The Grass Crown (70 page)

He knew the very moment when Marius joined battle with the Marsi, for the wind that day was blowing from the north, and carried the sounds across the walled vineyards so clearly that Sulla’s men fancied the fight was actually going on among the grapes. A courier had come at dawn to tell Sulla it was probably going to be today; so Sulla put his forces in an eight-deep line beneath the ten-foot fences of the vineyards, and waited.

Sure enough, fleeing Marsi began tumbling over the stone ramparts perhaps four hours after the sounds began—and tumbled straight onto the drawn swords of Sulla’s legionaries, thirsty for a share of the action. In some places there was hard fighting—these were despairing men—but nowhere did Sulla stand in any danger.

As usual I am Gaius Marius’s skilled lackey, Sulla thought, standing on high ground to watch. His was the mind conceived the strategy, his the hand directed the tactics, his the will finished it successfully. And here am I on the wrong side of some wretched wall, picking up his leavings like the hungry man I am. How well he knows himself—and how well he knows me.

Wishing he didn’t have to rejoice, Sulla mounted his mule after his share of the fighting was over and rode the long way round to inform Gaius Marius on the Via Valeria that all had gone exactly as planned, that the Marsi involved were virtually extinct.

“I faced none other than Silo himself!” said Marius in his customary post-battle roar, clapping Sulla on the back and leading him into the command tent with an arm about his valued lieutenant’s shoulders. “Mind you, they were napping,” he said gleefully, “I suppose because this to them is home. I burst on them like a thunderclap, Lucius Cornelius! It seems they never dreamed Asinius might lose! No one came to tell them he had; all they knew was that he was moving because I had moved from Reate at last. So there I was coming round a sharp corner, straight into their faces. They were marching to reinforce Asinius. I fetched up just too far away to be obliged to join battle, formed my men into square, and looked as if I was prepared to fight defensively, but not to attack.

“'If you’re such a great general, Gaius Marius, come and fight me!' shouted Silo, sitting on a horse.”

“'If you’re such a great general, Quintus Poppaedius, make me!' I shouted back.”

“We’ll never know what he might have intended to do after that, because his men took the bit between their teeth and charged without his giving the command. Well, they made it easy for me. I know what to do, Lucius Cornelius. But Silo doesn’t. I say doesn’t, as he got away unharmed. When his men broke in panic he turned his horse to face east and galloped off. I doubt he’ll stop until he reaches Mutilus. Anyway, I forced the Marsi to retreat in one direction only—through the vineyards. Knowing you were there to finish them off on the other side. And that was that.”

“It was very well done, Gaius Marius,” said Sulla with complete sincerity.

And so they settled to a victory feast, Marius and Sulla and their deputies—and Young Marius, glowing with pride in his father, whom he now served as a cadet. Oh, there’s a pup bears watching! thought Sulla, and refused to watch him.

The battle was fought all over again, almost at greater length in time; but eventually, as the level in the wine amphorae grew ever lower, the talk turned inevitably to politics. The projected legislation of Lucius Caesar was the subject, coming as a shock to Marius’s juniors; he hadn’t told them of his conversation with Sulla in Fregellae. Reactions were mixed, yet against this huge concession. These were the soldiers, these were men who had been fighting now for six months, seen thousands of their comrades perish—and felt besides that the dodderers and cravens in Rome hadn’t given them a good chance to get into stride, to start winning. Those safe in Rome were apostrophized as a gaggle of dried-up old Vestal Virgins, with Philippus coming in for the strongest criticism, Lucius Caesar not far behind.

“The Julii Caesares are all over-bred bundles of nerves,” said Marius, face purple-red. “A pity we’ve had a Julius Caesar as senior consul in this crisis. I knew he’d break.”

“You sound, Gaius Marius, as if you’d rather we conceded absolutely nothing to the Italians,” said Sulla.

“I would rather we didn’t,” Marius said. “Until it came to open war it was different. But once a people declares itself an enemy of Rome’s, it’s an enemy of mine too. Forever.”

“So I feel,” said Sulla. “However, if Lucius Julius does succeed in convincing Senate and People to pass his law, it will decrease the chance of Etruria’s and Umbria’s going over. I’d heard there were fresh rumblings in both places.”

“Indeed. Which is why Lucius Cato Licinianus and Aulus Plotius have peeled Sextus Julius’s troops away from him and gone—Plotius to Umbria and Cato Licinianus to Etruria,” said Marius.

“What’s Sextus Julius doing, then?”

Young Marius answered, very loudly. “He’s recuperating in Rome. ’A very nasty chest’ was how my mother put it in her last letter.”

Sulla’s look should have squashed him, yet didn’t. Even when the commander-in-chief was one’s father, one didn’t butt into the conversation if one was only a contubernalis!

“No doubt the Etrurian campaign will do Cato Licinianus’s chances of winning a consulship for next year the world of good,” said Sulla. “Providing he does well. I imagine he will.”

“So do I,” said Marius, belching. “It’s a pea-sized undertaking—suitable for a pea like Cato Licinianus.”

Sulla grinned. “What, Gaius Marius, not impressed?”

Marius blinked. “Are you?”

“Anything but.” He had had more than enough wine; Sulla switched to water. “In the meantime, what do we do with ourselves? September is a market interval old, and I’ll be due to go back to Campania fairly soon. I’d like to make the most of what time I have left, if that’s possible.”

“I can’t believe Lucius Julius let Egnatius fool him in the Melfa Gorge!” Young Marius interrupted.

“You’re not old enough, my boy, to comprehend the extent of men’s idiocy,” said Marius, approving of the comment rather than disapproving of its maker making it. He turned then to Sulla. “We can’t hope for anything from Lucius Julius now that he’s back in Teanum Sidicinum a second time with a quarter of his army dead, so why return in a hurry, Lucius Cornelius? To hold Lucius Julius’s hand? I imagine there are plenty doing that already. I suggest we go on together to Alba Fucentia,” he said, ending with a peculiar sound somewhere between a laugh and a retch.

Sulla stiffened. “Are you all right?” he asked sharply.

For a moment Marius’s color went from puce to ashes. Then he recovered; the laugh was all a laugh should be. “After such a day, perfect, Lucius Cornelius! Now as I was saying, we’ll go on to relieve Alba Fucentia, after which—well, I fancy a stroll down through Samnium, don’t you? We’ll leave Sextus Julius to invest Asculum Picentum while we bait the Samnite bull. Investing cities is a bore, not my style.” He giggled tipsily. “Wouldn’t it be nice to show up in Teanum Sidicinum with Aesernia in the sinus of your toga as a present for Lucius Julius? How grateful he’d be!”

“How grateful indeed, Gaius Marius.”

The party broke up. Sulla and Young Marius helped Marius to his bed, settled him on it without fussing. Then Young Marius escaped with a vindictive look for Sulla, who had lingered to examine the limp mountain on the couch more closely.

“Lucius Cornelius,” said Marius, slurring his words, “come on your own in the morning to wake me, would you? I want some private talk with you. Can’t tonight. Oh, the wine!”

“Sleep well, Gaius Marius. In the morning it shall be.”

But in the morning it was not to be. When Sulla—none too well himself—ventured into the back compartment of the command tent, he found the mountain on the bed exactly as it had been the night before. Frowning, he approached quickly, feeling the beginnings of a horrible prickling. No, not fear that Marius was dead; the noise of his breathing had been audible from the front section of the tent. Now, gazing down, Sulla saw the right hand feebly plucking, picking at the sheet, and saw too Marius’s goggling eyes alive with a terror so profound it imitated madness. From slumped cheek to flaccid foot his left side was stilled, felled, immobile. Down had come the forest giant without a murmur, powerless to fend off a blow not seen or felt until the deed was over.

“Stroke,” mumbled Marius.

Sulla’s hand went out of its own volition to caress the sweat-soaked hair; now he could be loved. Now he was no more. “Oh, my poor old fellow!” Sulla lowered his cheek against Marius’s, turning his lips into the wet trickle of Marius’ s tears. ” My poor old one! You’re done for at last.”

Out came the words immediately, hideously distorted, yet quite distinct enough to hear with faces pressed together.

“Not—done—yet… Seven—times.”

Sulla reared back as if Marius had risen from the couch and struck him. Then, even as he scrubbed his palm across his own tears, he uttered a shrill little paroxysm of laughter, laughter ending as abruptly as it had begun. “If I have anything to do with it, Gaius Marius, you’re done for!”

“Not—done for,” said Marius, his still intelligent eyes no longer terrified; now they were angry. “Seven—times.”

In one stride Sulla arrived at the flap dividing front room from back, calling for help as if the Hound of Hades was snapping many-headed at his heels.

Only after every last army surgeon had come and gone and Marius had been made as comfortable as possible did Sulla call a meeting of those who milled outside the tent, barred from entering it by Young Marius, weeping desolately.

He held his conference in the camp forum, deeming it wiser to let the ranks see that something was being done; the news of Marius’s catastrophe had spread, and Young Marius was not the only one who wept.

“I am assuming command,” said Sulla evenly to the dozen men who clustered around him.

No one protested.

“We return to Latium at once, before the news of this can reach Silo or Mutilus.”

Now came the protest, from a Marcus Caecilius of the branch cognominated Cornutus. “that’s ridiculous!” he said indignantly. “Here we are not twenty miles from Alba Fucentia, and you’re saying we have to turn around and go back?”

Lips thin, Sulla gestured widely with his arm, encompassing the many groups of soldiers who stood watching and weeping. “Look at them, you fool!” he snapped. “Go on into the enemy heartlands with them! They’ve lost the stomach for it! We have to gentle them along until we’re safely inside our own frontiers. Cornutus—then we have to find them another general they can love a tenth as well!”

Cornutus opened his mouth to say something further, then shut it, shrugged helplessly.

“Anyone else got anything to say?” asked Sulla.

It appeared no one had.

“All right, then. Strike camp on the double. I’ve sent word to my own legions on the far side of the vineyards already. They’ll be waiting for us down the road.”

“What about Gaius Marius?” asked a very young Licinius. “He might die if we move him.”

Sulla’s bark of laughter shocked them rigid. “Gaius Marius? You couldn’t kill him with a sacrificial axe, boy!” Seeing their reaction, he brought his emotions very carefully under control before he went on. “Never fear, gentlemen, Gaius Marius assured me himself not two hours ago that I haven’t seen the last of him yet. And I believed him! So we will take him with us. There will be no scarcity of volunteers to carry his litter.”

“Are we all going to Rome?” asked the young Licinius timidly.

Only now that he had himself in hand did Sulla perceive how badly frightened and rudderless they all were; but they were Roman nobles, and that meant they questioned everything, weighed everything in terms of their own positions. By rights he ought to be treating them as delicately as newborn kittens.

“No, we are not all going to Rome,” said Sulla without a trace of delicacy in voice or manner. “When we reach Carseoli, you, Marcus Caecilius Cornutus, will assume command of the army. You will put it into its camp outside Reate. His son and I will take Gaius Marius to Rome, with five cohorts of troops as his honor guard.”

“Very well, Lucius Cornelius, if that’s how you wish it done, I suppose that’s how it will have to be done,” said Cornutus.

The look he got from those strange light eyes set what felt like a thousand maggots crawling inside his jaws.

“You are not mistaken, Marcus Caecilius, in thinking that it must be done the way I wish it done,” said Sulla softly, a caress in his voice. “And if it isn’t done precisely as I wish, I’ll grant you a wish—that you’d never been born! Is that quite clear? Good! Now move out.”

Young Pompey

When news of Lucius Caesar’s defeat of Mutilus at Acerrae had reached Rome, senatorial spirits had temporarily lifted. A proclamation was issued to the effect that it was no longer necessary for Roman citizens to wear the sagum. Then when news came of Lucius Caesar’s defeat in the Melfa Gorge for the second time, together with casualty figures almost exactly equaling enemy losses at Acerrae, no one in the Senate had moved to order the proclamation reversed; that would have pointed up the new defeat.

“Futile,” Marcus Aemilius Princeps Senatus had said to the few senators who turned up to debate the issue. His lip trembled, was resolutely quelled. “What we have to face is a far more serious fact—that we are losing this war.”

Philippus wasn’t present to argue. Nor was Quintus Varius, still busy prosecuting minor lights for treason; now that he had abandoned quarry like Antonius Orator and Scaurus Princeps Senatus, the victims of his special court were mounting.

Thus, deprived of the stimulus of opposition, Scaurus found himself without the will to go on, and sat down heavily upon his stool. I am too old, he thought—how can Marius cope with a whole theater of war when he’s the same age I am?

That question was answered at the end of Sextilis, when a courier came to inform the Senate that Gaius Marius and his troops had beaten Herius Asinius with the loss of seven thousand Marrucine lives, including Herius Asinius’s. But such was the depth of the depression within the city that no one thought it wise to celebrate; instead, the city waited for the next few days to bring news of an equivalent defeat. Sure enough, some days later another courier arrived and presented himself to the Senate, whose members sat, stony-faced and stiff-backed, to hear the bad tidings. Only Scaurus had come among the consulars.

Gaius Marius takes great pleasure in informing the Senate and People of Rome that, on this day, he and his armies did inflict a crushing defeat upon Quintus Poppaedius Silo and the men of the Marsi. Fifteen thousand Marsians lie dead, and five thousand more are taken prisoner.

Gaius Marius wishes to commend the invaluable contribution of Lucius Cornelius Sulla to this victory, and begs to be excused a full account of events until such time as he can inform the Senate and People of Rome that Alba Fucentia has been relieved. Long live Rome!

At first reading, no one believed it. A stir passed along the thinned white ranks, too sparse upon the tiers to look impressive. Scaurus read the letter out again, voice shaking. And finally the cheers started. Within an hour, all of Rome was cheering. Gaius Marius had done it! Gaius Marius had reversed Rome’s fortunes! Gaius Marius, Gaius Marius, Gaius Marius!

“He’s everybody’s hero yet again,” said Scaurus to the flamen Dialis, Lucius Cornelius Merula, who hadn’t missed one meeting of the Senate since the war had begun, despite the huge number of taboos which hedged the flamen Dialis round. Alone among his peers, the flamen Dialis could never don a toga; instead, he was enveloped by a double-layered heavy woolen cape, the laena, which was cut on a full circle, and on his head he wore a close-fitting ivory helm adorned with the symbols of Jupiter and topped with a hard disc of wool pierced by an ivory spike. Alone among his peers he was hirsute, for this flamen Dialis had elected to leave his hair hanging down his back and his beard straggling down his chest rather than endure the torture of being barbered by bone or bronze. The flamen Dialis could not come into bodily contact with iron of any kind—which meant he could have no contact with war. Thwarted in doing his military duty to his country, Lucius Cornelius Merula had taken to attending the Senate assiduously.

Merula sighed. “Well, Marcus Aemilius, patricians though we may be, I think it’s high time we admitted to ourselves that our bloodlines are so attenuated we can no longer produce a popular hero.”

“Nonsense!” snapped Scaurus. “Gaius Marius is a freak!”

“Without him, where would we be?”

“In Rome, and true Romans!”

“You don’t approve of his victory?”

“Of course I approve! I just wish the name at the bottom of the letter had been Lucius Cornelius Sulla’s!”

“He was a good praetor urbanus, I know, but I never heard he was a Marius upon the battlefield,” said Merula.

“Until Gaius Marius quits the battlefield, how can we know? Lucius Cornelius Sulla has been with Gaius Marius since—oh, the war against Jugurtha. And has always made a large contribution to Gaius Marius’s victories. Marius takes the credit.”

“Be fair, Marcus Aemilius! Gaius Marius’s letter made specific mention of Lucius Sulla! I for one thought the praise ungrudging. Nor can I hear a word of disparagement about the man who has finally answered my prayers,” said Merula.

“A man answers your prayers, flamen Dialis? that’s an odd way of putting it, surely.”

“Our gods do not answer us directly, Princeps Senatus. If they are displeased they present us with some sort of phenomenon, and when they act they do so through the agency of men.”

“I am as aware of that as you are!” cried Scaurus, goaded. “I love Gaius Marius as much as I hate him. But I could still wish that the name on the bottom of the letter had been another’s!”

One of the Senate clerks entered the chamber, deserted now save for Scaurus and Merula, who had fallen behind.

“Princeps Senatus, an urgent communication has just come from Lucius Cornelius Sulla.”

Merula giggled. “There you are, an answer to your prayers! A letter with Lucius Sulla’s name on its bottom!”

A scathing look was Merula’s answer; Scaurus took the tiny roll and spread it between his hands. It contained, he saw in utter astonishment, two scant lines, carefully printed in big characters, and having dots between the words. Sulla wanted no misinterpretation.

GAIUS • MARIUS • FELLED • BY • STROKE • ARMY • MOVED • TO • REATE • AM • RETURNING • TO • ROME • AT • ONCE • BEARING • MARIUS • SULLA

Bereft of speech, Scaurus Princeps Senatus gave the sheet to Merula and stumbled to a seat on the bare bottom tier. “Edepol!” Merula too sat down. “Oh, is nothing ever going to go right in this war? Is Gaius Marius dead, do you think? Is that what Lucius Sulla means?”

“I think he lives but is incapable of command, and that his troops know it,” said Scaurus. He drew a breath, bellowed, “Clerk!”

Hovering in the doorway, the scribe returned immediately to stand before Scaurus; he was bursting with curiosity.

“Call out the heralds. Have them proclaim the news that Gaius Marius has had a stroke, and is being returned to Rome by his legate Lucius Cornelius Sulla.”

The scribe gasped, blanched, hurried off.

“Was that wise, Marcus Aemilius?” asked Merula.

“Only the Great God knows, flamen Dialis. I do not. All I know is that if I called the Senate to discuss this first, they’d vote to suppress the news. And that I cannot condone,” said Scaurus strongly. He got up. “Walk with me. I have to tell Julia before the heralds start braying from the rostra.”

Thus it was that when the five cohorts of troops escorting Gaius Marius’s litter came through the Colline Gate, their spears wreathed in cypress, their swords and daggers reversed, they entered a marketplace festooned with garlands of flowers and thronged with silent people—a feast and a funeral at one, it seemed. And so it was all the way to the Forum Romanum, where again flowers hung everywhere, but the crowds were still and voiceless. The flowers had been put out to celebrate Gaius Marius’s great victory; his defeat by illness had caused the silence.

When the closely curtained litter appeared behind the soldiers, a great whisper spread:

“He must be alive! He must be alive!”

Sulla and his cohorts halted in the lower Forum alongside the rostra, while Gaius Marius was carried up the Clivus Argentarius to his house. Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus climbed alone to the top of the rostra.

“The Third Founder of Rome lives, Quirites!” Scaurus thundered. “As always, he has turned the course of war in Rome’s favor, and Rome cannot be grateful enough. Make offerings for his well-being, though it may be that it is time for Gaius Marius to leave us. His condition is grave. But thanks to him, Quirites, our condition has improved immeasurably.”

No one cheered. No one wept either. Weeping would be saved for his funeral, for a moment without hope. Then Scaurus came down off the rostra and the people began to disperse.

“He won’t die,” said Sulla, looking very tired.

Scaurus snorted. “I never thought he would. He hasn’t been consul seven times yet, so he can’t let himself die.”

“That is exactly how he put it.”

“What, he’s still able to speak?”

“A little. There’s no lack of words, just clumsiness getting them out. Our army surgeon says it’s because his left side bore the blow, not his right—though why that should be, I don’t know. Nor does the army surgeon. He simply insists that’s the usual pattern field surgeons see when heads are damaged. If the paralysis of the body is on the right, speech is obliterated. If the paralysis is on the left, speech is retained.”

“How extraordinary! Why doesn’t one hear this from our city physicians?” asked Scaurus.

“I suppose they don’t see enough broken heads.”

“True.” Scaurus took Sulla by the arm warmly. “Come home with me, Lucius Cornelius. Take a little wine and tell me absolutely everything that’s happened. I had thought you still with Lucius Julius in Campania.”

Not with every ounce of will could Sulla suppress his complete withdrawal. “I’d rather we went to my house, Marcus Aemilius. I am still in armor, and it’s hot.”

Scaurus sighed. “It is time we both forgot what happened so many years ago,” he said sincerely. “My wife is older, more settled, and much occupied with her children.”

“Then—your house it shall be.”

She was waiting in the atrium to receive them, as anxious to know the condition of Gaius Marius as everyone else in Rome. Now twenty-eight years of age, she knew the felicitude of an increasing rather than a fading beauty; a brown beauty as rich as a fur pelt, though the eyes she lifted to rest on Sulla’s face were the grey of the sea on a cloudy day.

It did not escape Sulla that, though Scaurus beamed upon her with genuine and obviously unquestioning affection, she was afraid of her husband, and did not see how he felt.

“Welcome, Lucius Cornelius,” she said colorlessly.

“I thank you, Caecilia Dalmatica.”

“There are refreshments laid out in your study, husband,” she said to Scaurus colorlessly. “Is Gaius Marius going to die?”

Sulla answered her, smiling easily now the first moment was gone; this was very different from seeing her in Marius’s house at a dinner party. “No, Caecilia Dalmatica. We haven’t seen the last of Gaius Marius yet, so much I can promise you.”

She sighed in simple relief. “Then I will leave you.”

The two men stood in the atrium until she disappeared, after which Scaurus conducted Sulla to his tablinum.

“Do you want command of the Marsic theater?” Scaurus asked, handing Sulla wine.

“I doubt the Senate would give it to me, Princeps Senatus.”

“Frankly, so do I. But do you want it?”

“No, I don’t. My career throughout the year of this war has been based in Campania aside from this special exercise with Gaius Marius, and I’d prefer to stay in the theater I know. Lucius Julius is expecting me back,” Sulla said, well aware what he intended to do when the new consuls were in office, but having no wish to make Scaurus a party to his plans.

“Are they your troops in Marius’s escort?”

“Yes. The other fifteen cohorts I sent directly to Campania. I’ll take the rest myself tomorrow.”

“Oh, I wish you were standing for consul!” said Scaurus. “It is the most miserable field in half a generation!”

“I’m standing with Quintus Pompeius Rufus at the end of next year,” said Sulla firmly.

“So I had heard. A pity.”

“I couldn’t win an election this year, Marcus Aemilius.”

“You could—if I threw my weight behind you.”

Sulla grinned sourly. “The offer comes too late. I’ll be too busy in Campania to don the toga Candida. Besides, I’d have to take pot luck with my colleague, whereas Quintus Pompeius and I will run as a team. My daughter is to marry his son.”

“Then I withdraw my offer. You are right. Rome will just have to muddle through this coming year. It will be a great pleasure to have relatives as consuls the following year. Harmony in the chair is a wonderful thing. And you’ll dominate Quintus Pompeius as easily as he’ll accept your domination.”

“So I think, Princeps Senatus. Election time is really the only time Lucius Julius can spare me, as he intends to wind hostilities down in order to return to Rome himself. I think I’ll marry my daughter to Quintus Pompeius’s son this December, even though she won’t be eighteen. She’s looking forward to it very much,” lied Sulla blandly, knowing perfectly well that he still had a most unwilling child on his hands, but trusting to Fortune.

His understanding of Cornelia Sulla’s attitude was reinforced when he came home some two hours later. Aelia greeted him with the news that Cornelia Sulla had tried to run away from home.

“Luckily her girl was too frightened not to report to me,” Aelia ended mournfully, for she loved her stepdaughter dearly, and for her stepdaughter’s sake wished she could have the marriage of her heart—a match with Young Marius.

“Just what did she think she was going to do, wandering around the war-torn countryside?” asked Sulla.

“I have no idea, Lucius Cornelius. I don’t think she had either. It was an impulse, is my guess.”

“Then the sooner she’s married to young Quintus Pompeius, the better,” said Sulla grimly. “I’ll see her now.”

“Here? In your study?”

“Here, Aelia. In my study.”

Knowing he didn’t appreciate her—nor appreciate her sympathy for Cornelia Sulla—Aelia gazed at her husband in mingled fear and pity. “Please, Lucius Cornelius, try not to be too hard on her!”

A petition Sulla ignored by turning his back.

Cornelia Sulla was brought to him looking much like a prisoner, placed as she was between two male household slaves.