The Grass Crown (84 page)

“You can’t!” said Metellus Pius in a winded voice. “You haven’t been praetor yet!”

“It is my contention that there is nothing on the tablets to prevent a man’s seeking the consulship before he is praetor,” said Caesar Strabo, and produced a screed so long that the audience groaned. “I have here a dissertation which I shall read from beginning to end to prove my contention beyond all argument.”

“Roll it up and don’t bother, Gaius Julius Strabo!” called the new tribune of the plebs Sulpicius from the crowd below the candidates’ platform. “I interpose my veto! You may not run.”

“Oh, come, Publius Sulpicius! Let us try the law for once instead of using it to try people!” cried Caesar Strabo.

“I veto your candidacy, Gaius Julius Strabo. Come down from there and join your peers,” said Sulpicius firmly.

“Then I declare my candidacy for praetor!”

“Not this year,” Sulpicius said. “I veto that too.”

Sometimes the younger brother of Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar and Lucius Julius Caesar the censor could be vicious and his temper lead him into difficulties, but today Caesar Strabo merely shrugged, grinned, and walked down quite happily to stand with Sulpicius.

“Fool! Why did you do that?” asked Sulpicius.

“It might have worked if you hadn’t been here.”

“I would have killed you first,” said a new voice.

Caesar Strabo turned, saw that the voice belonged to the young man Gaius Flavius Fimbria, and sneered. “Pull your head in! You couldn’t kill a fly, you money-hungry cretin!”

“No, no!” said Sulpicius quickly, putting himself between them. “Go away, Gaius Flavius! Go on, go away! Shoo! Leave the governing of Rome to your seniors—and your betters.”

Caesar Strabo laughed, Fimbria slunk away.

“He’s a nasty piece of work, young and all though he may be,” said Sulpicius. “He’s never forgiven you for prosecuting Varius.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Caesar Strabo. “When Varius died, he lost his only visible means of support.”

There were to be no more surprises; once all the nominations for consul and praetor were in, everyone went home to wait with what patience he could muster for the appearance of the consul, Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo.

He did not return to Rome until almost the end of December, then insisted upon celebrating his triumph before he held any elections. That he had delayed his appearance in Rome was due to a brilliant idea he had conceived after the capture of Asculum Picentum. His triumphal parade (of course he was triumphing) would be a poor sort of affair; no spoils to display, no fascinatingly exotic floats depicting tableaux of sights and peoples alien to the inhabitants of Rome. At which point he had his brilliant idea. He would display thousands of male Italian children in his parade! His troops were put to scouring the countryside, and in time several thousand Italian boys aged between four and twelve were rounded up. So when he rode in his triumphal chariot along the prescribed route through the streets of Rome, he was preceded by a legion of little lads shuffling along; the sight was awesome, if only because it indicated how many Italian men had lost their lives through the agency of Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo.

The curule elections were held a scant three days before the New Year. Lucius Cornelius Sulla was returned as senior consul, with his friend Quintus Pompeius Rufus as his junior colleague. Two men with red hair from opposite ends of the Roman nobleman spectrum. Rome looked forward to having a team in office for a change, and hoped that some of the damage due to the war would be repaired.

It was to be a six-praetor year, which meant that most of the governors of overseas provinces were prorogued: Gaius Sentius and his legate Quintus Bruttius Sura in Macedonia; Publius Servilius Vatia and his legates Gaius Coelius and Quintus Sertorius in the Gauls; Gaius Cassius in Asia Province; Quintus Oppius in Cilicia; Gaius Valerius Flaccus in Spain; the new praetor Gaius Norbanus was sent to Sicily, and another new praetor, Publius Sextilius, was sent to Africa. The urban praetor was a very elderly man, Marcus Junius Brutus. He had a son just admitted to the Senate, but he had announced himself a candidate for praetor despite lifelong ill health because, he said, Rome needed decent men in office when so many decent men were in the field and unavailable. The praetor peregrinus was a plebeian Servilius of the Augur’s family.

New Year’s Day dawned bright and blue, and the omens of the night watch had been auspicious. It was perhaps not surprising that, after two years of dread and fear, all of Rome decided to turn out to watch the new consuls inaugurated. Everyone could see complete victory against the Italians looming, and there were many who hoped the new consuls would find the time now to deal with the city’s appalling financial troubles.

Returned to his house from the night watch, Lucius Cornelius Sulla had his purple-bordered toga draped around him, and with his own hands put on his Grass Crown. He sallied forth from his house to relish the novelty of walking behind no less than twelve togate lictors who carried on their shoulders the bundle of rods ritually bound with red leather thongs. Ahead of him went the knights who had chosen to escort him rather than his colleague, and behind him walked the senators, including his dear friend the Piglet.

This is my day, he told himself as the huge crowd sighed and then voiced its approval at sight of the Grass Crown. For the first time in my life I have no rivals and no peers. I am the senior consul, I have won the war against the Italians, I wear the Grass Crown. I am greater than a king.

The two processions originating at the houses of the new consuls joined up at the foot of the Clivus Palatinus where the old Porta Mugonia still stood, a relic of the days when Romulus had walled his Palatine city. From there, six thousand men wended their way in solemn order across the Velia and down the Clivus Sacer into the lower Forum, most of them knights with the narrow stripe—the angustus clavus—on their tunics, a thinned Senate following behind the consuls and their lictors. And everywhere spectators cheered; they were perched on the front walls of the Forum houses, the arcade and upper roofs of the basilicas, the roofs of those temples offering a view, every set of steps leading up onto the Palatine, all the temple vestibules and steps, the roofs of the Via Nova taverns and shops, the loggias of the great houses of Palatine and Capitol facing the Forum. People. People everywhere. Cheering the man wearing the Grass Crown, a wreath most of them had never seen.

Sulla walked with a regal dignity he had not owned before, acknowledging the admiration by inclining his head very slightly only, no smile touching his lips, no smugness or glee in his eyes. This was the dream made real; this was his day. One of the things he found fascinating was that he actually saw individual people in the vast crowds—a beautiful woman, an old man, a child perched on someone’s shoulders, some outlandish foreigner—and Metrobius. Almost he stopped, forced himself onward. Just a face in the crowd. Loyal and discreet as always. No sign of a special relationship showed on his darkly handsome face, save perhaps in his eyes, though no one except Sulla could have known it. Sad eyes. And then he was gone, he was behind. He was in the past.

As the knights reached the area bordering the well of the Comitia and turned left to walk between the temple of Saturn and the vaulted arcade opposite housing the Twelve Gods, they paused, stopped, swung their heads toward the Clivus Argentarius and began to cheer in an acclamation far louder than that they had accorded Sulla. He heard but couldn’t see, and was conscious of sweat crawling between his shoulder blades. Someone was stealing his crowd! For the crowd too had turned from every rooftop and tier of steps toward the same place, their cheers swelling amid a swaying sea of hands like water weeds.

No greater effort had Sulla ever had cause to make than the one he made now—no change in his expression, no diminution in the royal inclinations of his head, not even a flicker of feeling in his eyes. The procession started to move again; across the lower Forum he walked behind his lictors, never once craning his neck to verify what awaited him at the bottom of the Clivus Argentarius. What had stolen his crowd. Was stealing his day. His day!

And there he was. Gaius Marius. Accompanied by the boy. Clad in toga praetexta. Waiting to join the ranks of the curule senators who immediately followed Sulla and Pompeius Rufus. Back in action again. Going to attend the inauguration of the new consuls, attend the meeting of the Senate afterward in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus atop the Capitol, attend the feast in the same temple. Gaius Marius. Gaius Marius the military genius. Gaius Marius the hero.

When Sulla drew opposite him, Gaius Marius bowed. Body filled with a howling rage he couldn’t permit one single person to see—even Gaius Marius—Sulla turned and bowed to him. Whereupon the adulation reached fever pitch, the people screamed and shrieked with joy, every . face was wet with tears. Then after Sulla turned to the left to walk beside the temple of Saturn and ascend the Capitol hill, Gaius Marius took his place among the men with purple-bordered togas, the boy at his side. So much had he improved that he hardly dragged his left foot, could display his left hand holding up all those heavy folds of toga and let the people see that it was no longer clumped and deformed; as for his face—he could afford to ignore the grimace his smile had become by not smiling.

I will ruin you for this, Gaius Marius, thought Sulla. You knew this was my day! Yet you couldn’t resist showing me that Rome still belongs to you. That I—a patrician Cornelius!—am less than the dust compared to you, an Italian hayseed with no Greek. That I do not have the love of the people. That I can never rise to your heights. Well, maybe all this is really so, Gaius Marius. But I will ruin you. You yielded to the temptation of showing me on my day. If you had chosen to return to public life tomorrow—or the day after—or any other day—the rest of your life would be very different from the agony I will make it. For I will ruin you. Not by poison. Not by knife. I will make it impossible for your descendants ever to exhibit your imago in a family funeral procession, I will mar your reputation for all time.

Somehow it got itself over and done with, that awful day. Looking pleased and proud, the new senior consul stood to one side in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the same hugely mindless grin on his face that the statue of the Great God wore, allowing the senators to pay homage to Gaius Marius just as if most of them didn’t loathe him. When the realization dawned upon Sulla that Marius had done what he had done in all innocence—that he hadn’t stopped to think he might be stealing Sulla’s day, only thought what a splendid day today would be to make his reappearance in the Senate—the realization had no power to mollify Sulla’s rage or soften his vow to ruin this terrible old man. Rather, the sheer thoughtlessness of it made Marius’s action more intolerable still; in Marius’s mind, Sulla mattered so little he never so much as loomed in the background of Marius’s mirror of self. And for that, Marius would pay bitterly.

“Huh-huh-how dared he!” whispered Metellus Pius to Sulla as the meeting concluded and the public slaves began to bring in the feast. “He duh-duh-did it deliberately!”

“Oh yes, he did it deliberately,” lied Sulla.

“Are you guh-guh-going to let him geh-geh-get away with it?” Metellus Pius demanded, almost weeping.

“Calm down, Piglet, you’re stuttering,” said Sulla, using that detested name, but in a manner the Piglet couldn’t find detestable. “I refuse to let any of these fools see how I feel. Let them—and him!—think I approve wholeheartedly. I’m the consul, Piglet. He isn’t. He’s just a sick old man trying to snatch back an ascendancy he can never know again.”

“Quintus Lutatius is livid about it,” said Metellus Pius, concentrating on his stammer. “See him over there? He just gave Marius a piece of his mind, and the old hypocrite tried to pretend he never meant it that way, would you believe it?”

“I missed that,” said Sulla, looking to where Catulus Caesar was talking with obviously furious hauteur to his brother the censor and to Quintus Mucius Scaevola, who looked unhappy. Sulla grinned. “He’s picked the wrong audience in Quintus Mucius if he’s saying insulting things about Gaius Marius.”

“Why?” asked the Piglet, curiosity getting the better of rage and indignation.

“There’s a marriage in the wind. Quintus Mucius is giving his daughter to Young Marius as soon as she’s of age.”

“Ye gods! He can do much better than that!”

Sulla lifted one brow. “Can he really, Piglet dear? Think of all that money!”

When Sulla went home he declined all company save Catulus Caesar and Metellus Pius, though when the three of them reached his house he entered it alone, with a wave of farewell for his escort. The house was quiet and his wife not in evidence, for which Sulla was enormously glad; he didn’t think he could have faced all that wretched niceness without murdering her. Hurrying to his study, he bolted its doors, pulled the shutters of the colonnade window closed. The toga fell to the floor in a milky puddle around his feet and was kicked aside indifferently; face now displaying what he felt, he crossed to the long console table upon which rested six miniature temples in perfect condition, paintwork fresh and bright, gilding rich. The five belonging to his ancestors he had paid to have refurbished just after he had entered the Senate; the sixth housed his own likeness, and had been delivered from the workshop of Magius of the Velabrum only the day before.

Its catch was cunningly concealed behind the entablature of the front row of columns; when it was released, the columns divided in the midline as two opening doors. Inside he saw himself, a life-sized face and jaw connected to the anterior half of a neck, the whole complete with Sulla’s ears; behind the ears were strings which held the mask in place while it was being worn, and which were hidden by the wig.

Made of beeswax, the imago was brilliantly done, its skin tinted as white as Sulla’s own, the brows and lashes—both real—of the exact brown he colored them upon occasions like meetings of the Senate or dinner parties within Rome. The beautifully shaped lips were slightly parted because Sulla always breathed through his mouth, and the eyes were uncanny replicas of his own; however, minute inspection revealed that the pupils were actually holes through which the actor donning the mask could see just about well enough to walk if he was guided. Only when it came to the wig had Magius of the Velabrum fallen down on exact verisimilitude, for nowhere could he find hair of the correct color. Rome was plentifully endowed with wigmakers and false hair, and various shades of blond or red were by far the most popular hues; the original owners of the hair were barbarians of Gallic or German blood forced to part with their locks by slave-dealers or masters in need of extra money. The best Magius had been able to do was definitely redder than Sulla’s thatch, but the luxuriance and the style were perfect.