Fortune's Favorites Page 27

Then Mucia came in; Julia shrank away, averted her gaze.

  Aurelia had sat bolt upright, the planes of her face sharp and flinty. "Mucia Tertia, do you blame Julia for your father's murder?" she demanded.

  "Of course not," said Young Marius's wife, and pulled a chair over so that she could sit close enough to Julia to take her hands. "Please, Julia, look at me!"

  "I cannot!"

  "You must! I do not intend to move back to my father's house and live with my stepmother. Nor do I intend to seek a place in my own mother's house, with those frightful boys of hers. I want to stay here with my dear kind mother-in-law."

  So that had been all right. Some kind of life had gone on for Julia and Mucia Tertia, though they heard nothing from Young Marius walled up in Praeneste, and the news from various battlefields was always in Sulla's favor. Had he been Aurelia's son, reflected Aurelia's son, Young Marius would have drawn little comfort from dwelling upon his mother while the days in Praeneste dragged on interminably. Aurelia was not as soft, not as loving, not as forgiving as Julia-but then, decided Caesar with a smile, if she had been, he might have turned out more like Young Marius! Caesar owned his mother's detachment. And her hardness too.

  Bad news piled on top of bad news: Carbo had stolen away in the night; Sulla had turned the Samnites back; Pompey and Crassus had defeated the men Carbo had deserted in Clusium; the Piglet and Varro Lucullus were in control of Italian Gaul; Sulla had entered Rome for a period of hours only to set up a provisional government-and left Torquatus behind with Thracian cavalry to ensure his provisional government remained a functioning government.

  But Sulla had not come to visit Aurelia, which fascinated her son sufficiently to try a little fishing. Of that meeting his mother had found thrust upon her outside Teanum Sidicinum she had said just about nothing; now here she was with her calm unimpaired and a tradition broken.

  "He ought to have come to see you!" Caesar had said.

  "He will never come to see me again," said Aurelia.

  "Why not?"

  "Those visits belong to a different time."

  "A time when he was handsome enough to fancy?" the son snapped, that rigidly suppressed temper suddenly flashing out.

  But she froze, gave him a look which crushed him. "You are stupid as well as insulting! Leave me!" she said.

  He left her. And left the subject severely alone thereafter. Whatever Sulla meant to her was her business.

  They had heard of the siege tower Young Marius built and of its miserable end, of the other attempts he made to break through Ofella's wall. And then on the last day of October there came the shocking news that ninety thousand Samnites were sitting in Pompey Strabo's camp outside the Colline Gate.

  The next two days were the worst of Caesar's life. Choking inside his priestly garb, unable to touch a sword or look on death at the moment it happened, he locked himself in his study and commenced work on a new epic poem-in Latin, not in Greek-choosing the dactylic hexameter to make his task more difficult. The noise of battle came clearly to his ears, but he shut it out and struggled on with his maddening spondees and empty phrases, aching to be there and in it, admitting that he would not have cared which side he fought on, as long as he fought....

  And after the sounds died away during the night he came charging out of his study to find his mother in her office bent over her accounts, and stood in her doorway convulsed with rage.

  "How can I write what I cannot do?" he demanded. “What is the greatest literature about, if not war and warriors? Did Homer waste his time on flowery claptrap? Did Thucydides deem the art of beekeeping a suitable subject for his pen?"

  She knew exactly how to deflate him, so she said in cool ledgerish tones, "Probably not," and returned to her work.

  And that night was the end of peace. Julia's son was dead-all of them were dead, and Rome belonged to Sulla. Who did not come to see them, or send any message.

  That the Senate and the Centuriate Assembly had voted him the position of Dictator everyone knew, and talked about endlessly. But it was Lucius Decumius who told Caesar and young Gaius Matius from the other ground-floor apartment about the mystery of the disappearing knights.

  “All men who got rich under Marius or Cinna or Carbo, and that be no accident. You're lucky your tata has been dead for enough years, Pimple," Lucius Decumius said to Gaius Matius, who had borne the unflattering nickname of Pustula- Pimple-since he had been a toddler. "And your tata too, probably, young Peacock," he said to Caesar.

  "What do you mean?" asked Matius, frowning.

  "I means there's some awful discreet-looking fellows walking round Rome pinching rich knights," the caretaker of the crossroads college said. “Freedmen mostly, but not your average gossipy Greek with boyfriend troubles. They're all called Lucius Cornelius something-or-other. My Brethren and I, we calls them the Sullani. Because they belongs to him. Mark my words, young Peacock and Pimple, they do not bode no good! And I safely predicts that they are going to pinch a lot more rich knights."

  "Sulla can't do that!" said Matius, lips compressed.

  "Sulla can do anything he likes," said Caesar. "He's been made Dictator. That's better than being King. His edicts have the force of law, he's not tied to the lex Caecilia Didia of seventeen days between promulgation and ratification, he doesn't even have to discuss his laws in Senate or Assemblies. And he cannot be made to answer for a single thing he does- or for anything he's done in the past, for that matter. Mind you," he added thoughtfully, "I think that if Rome isn't taken into a very strong hand, she's finished. So I hope all goes well for him. And I hope he has the vision and the courage to do what must be done."

  "That man," said Lucius Decumius, "has the gall to do anything! Anything at all."

  Living as they did in the heart of the Subura-which was the poorest and the most polyglot district in Rome-they found that Sulla's proscriptions had not the profound effect on life that they did in places like the Carinae, the Palatine, the upper Quirinal and Viminal. Though there were knights of the First Class aplenty between the far poorer Suburanites, few of them held a status above tribunus aerarius, and few the kind of political contacts which imperiled their lives now that Sulla was in power.

  When the first list had displayed Young Marius's name second from the top, Julia and Mucia Tertia had come to see Aurelia; as these visits were usually the other way around, their advent was a surprise. So was news of the list, which had not yet spread as far as the Subura; Sulla had not kept Julia waiting for her fate.

  "I have had a notice served on me by the urban praetor-elect, the younger Dolabella." Julia shivered. "Not a pleasant man! My poor son's estate is confiscate. Nothing can be saved."

  “Your house too?'' Aurelia asked, white-faced.

  “Everything. He had a list of everything. All the mining interests in Spain, the lands in Etruria, our villa at Cumae, the house here in Rome, other lands Gaius Marius had acquired in Lucania and Umbria, the wheat latifundia on the Bagradas River in Africa Province, the dye works for wool in Hierapolis, the glassworks in Sidon. Even the farm in Arpinum. It all belongs now to Rome and will, I was informed, be put up for auction."

  "Oh, Julia!"

  Being Julia, she found a smile and actually made it reach her eyes. "Oh, it isn't all bad news! I was given a letter from Sulla which authorizes payment out of the estate of one hundred silver talents. That is what he assesses my dowry at, had Gaius Marius ever got round to giving me one. For, as all the gods know, I came to him penniless! But I am to have the hundred talents because, Sulla informs me, I am the sister of Julilla. For her sake, as she was his wife, he will not see me want. The letter was actually quite gracefully phrased."

  "It sounds a lot of money-but after what you've had, it's nothing," said Aurelia, tight-lipped.

  "It will buy me a nice house on the Vicus Longus or the Alta Semita, and yield me an adequate income besides. The slaves of course are to go with the estate, but Sulla has allowed me to keep Strophantes-I am so glad about that! The
poor old man is quite crazed with grief." She stopped, her grey eyes full of tears-not for herself, but for Strophantes. "Anyway," she continued, "I will manage very comfortably. Which is more than the wives or mothers of other men on the list can say. They will get absolutely nothing."

  "And what about you, Mucia Tertia?" asked Caesar. “Are you classified as Marian or Mucian?'' She displayed no sign of grief for her husband, he noted, or even self-pity at her widow's status. One knew Aunt Julia grieved, though she never showed it. But Mucia Tertia?

  "I am classified as Marian," she said, "so I lose my dowry. My father's estate is heavily encumbered. There was nothing for me in his will. Had there been something, my stepmother would try to keep it from me anyway. My own mother is all right-Metellus Nepos is safe, he is for Sulla. But their two boys must be thought of ahead of me. Julia and I have talked it over on the way here. I am to go with her. Sulla has forbidden me to remarry, as I was the wife of a Marius. Not that I wish to take another husband. I do not."

  "It's a nightmare!" cried Aurelia. She looked down at her hands, inky-fingered and a little swollen in their joints. “It may be that we too will be put on the list. My husband was Gaius Marius's man to the end. And Cinna's at the time he died."

  "But this insula is in your name, Mater. As all the Cottae stand for Sulla, it should remain yours," Caesar said. "I may lose my land. But at least as flamen Dialis I will have my salary from the State and a State house in the Forum. I suppose Cinnilla will lose her dowry, such as it is."

  "I gather Cinna's relatives will lose everything," Julia said, and sighed. "Sulla means to see an end to opposition."

  "What of Annia? And the older daughter, Cornelia Cinna?" asked Aurelia. "I have always disliked Annia. She was a poor mother to my little Cinnilla, and she remarried with indecent haste after Cinna died. So I daresay she'll survive."

  "You're right, she will. She's been married to Pupius Piso Frugi long enough to be classified as Pupian," said Julia. "I found out a lot from Dolabella, he was only too anxious to tell me who was going to suffer! Poor Cornelia Cinna is classified with Gnaeus Ahenobarbus. Of course she lost her house to Sulla when he first arrived, and Annia wouldn't take her in then. I believe she's living with an old Vestal aunt out on the Via Recta."

  “Oh, I am so glad both my girls are married to relative nobodies!'' Aurelia exclaimed.

  "I have a piece of news," said Caesar, to draw the women's attention away from their own troubles.

  "What?" asked Mucia Tertia.

  “Lepidus must have had a premonition of this. Yesterday he divorced his wife. Saturninus's daughter, Appuleia."

  "Oh, that's terrible!" cried Julia. "I can bear the fact that the ones who fought against Sulla must be punished, but why must their children and their children's children suffer too? All the fuss about Saturninus was so long ago! Sulla won't care about Saturninus, so why should Lepidus do that to her? She's borne him three splendid sons!"

  "She won't bear him any more," Caesar said. "She took a nice hot bath and opened her veins. So now Lepidus is running around sobbing rivers of grief. Pah!"

  "Oh, but he was always that sort of man," said Aurelia with scorn. "I do not deny that there must be a place in the world for flimsy men, but the trouble with Marcus Aemilius Lepidus is that he genuinely believes he has substance."

  "Poor Lepidus!" sighed Julia.

  "Poor Appuleia," said Mucia Tertia rather dryly.

  But now, after what Cotta had told them, it seemed that the Caesars were not to be proscribed. The six hundred iugera at Bovillae were safe, Caesar would have a senatorial census. Not, he reflected wryly as he watched the snow pouring down the light well like a powdery waterfall, that he needed to worry about a senatorial census! The flamen Dialis was automatically a member of the Senate.

  As he watched this sudden appearance of real winter, his mother watched him.

  Such a nice person, she thought-and that is my doing, no one else's. For though he has many excellent qualities, he is far from perfect. Not as sympathetic or forgiving or tender as his father, for all that he has a look of his father about him. A look of me too. He is so brilliant in so many different ways. Send him anywhere in this building and he can fix whatever is wrong-pipes, tiles, plaster, shutters, drains, paint, wood. And the improvements he has made to our elderly inventor's brakes and cranes! He can actually write in Hebrew and Median! And speak a dozen languages, thanks to our amazing variety of tenants. Before he became a man he was a legend on the Campus Martius, so Lucius Decumius swears to me. He swims, he rides, he runs, all like the wind. The poems and plays he writes-as good as Plautus and Ennius, though I am his mother and should not say so. And his grasp of rhetoric, so Marcus Antonius Gnipho tells me, is without peer. How did Gnipho put it? My son can move stones to tears and mountains to rage. He understands legislation. And he can read anything at a single glance, no matter how bad the writing. In all of Rome there is no one else who can do that, even the prodigy Marcus Tullius Cicero. As for the women-how they pursue him! Up and down the Subura. He thinks I do not know, of course. He thinks I believe him chaste, waiting for his dear little wife. Well, that is better so. Men are strange creatures when it comes to the part of them makes them men. But my son is not perfect. Just superlatively gifted. He has a shocking temper, though he guards it well. He is self-centered in some ways and not always sensitive to the feelings and wants of others. As for this obsession he has about cleanliness-it pleases me to see him so fastidious, yet the extent of it he never got from me or anyone else. He won't look at a woman unless she's come straight from a bath, and I believe he actually inspects her from the top of her head to the spaces between her toes. In the Subura! However, he is greatly desired, so the standard of cleanliness among the local women has risen hugely since he turned fourteen. Precocious little beast! I always used to hope my husband availed himself of the local women during those many years he was away, but he always told me he didn't, he waited for me. If I disliked anything in him, it was that. Such a burden of guilt he shifted to me by keeping himself for me, whom he rarely saw. My son will never do that to his wife. I hope she appreciates her luck. Sulla. He has been summoned to see Sulla. I wish I knew why. I wish-

  She came out of herself with a start to find Caesar leaning across his desk snapping his fingers at her, and laughing.

  "Where were you?" he asked.

  "All over the place," she answered as she got up, feeling the chill. "I'll have Burgundus give you a brazier, Caesar. It is too cold in this room."

  "Fusspot!" he said lovingly to her back.

  "I don't want you confronting Sulla with a sniffle and a thousand sneezes," she said.

  But the morrow brought no sniffles, no sneezes. The young man presented himself at the house of Gnaeus Ahenobarbus a good summer hour before the winter dinnertime, prepared to kick his heels in the atrium rather than run the risk of arriving too late. Sure enough, the steward-an exquisitely oily Greek who subjected him to subtle come-hither glances-informed him that he was too early, would he mind waiting? Conscious of crawling skin, Caesar nodded curtly and turned his back on the man who would soon be famous, whom all Rome would know as Chrysogonus.

  But Chrysogonus wouldn't go; clearly he found the visitor attractive enough to pursue, and Caesar had the good sense not to do what he longed to do-knock the fellow's teeth down his throat. Then inspiration struck. Caesar walked briskly out onto the loggia, and the steward disliked the cold too much to follow him. This house had two loggias, and the one where Caesar stood making crescent patterns in the snow with the toe of his clog looked not down onto the Forum Romanum, but back up the Palatine cliff in the direction of the Clivus Victoriae. Right above him was the loggia of another house literally overhung the house of Ahenobarbus.

  Whose house? Caesar wrinkled his brow, remembered. Marcus Livius Drusus, assassinated in its atrium ten years ago. So this was where all those orphaned children lived under the arid supervision of... Who? That's right, the daughter of that Serviliu
s Caepio who had drowned coming back from his province! Gnaea? Yes, Gnaea. And her dreaded mother, the ghastly Porcia Liciniana! Lots of little Servilii Caepiones and Porcii Catones. The wrong Porcii Catones, of the branch Salonius. Descendants of a slave-there was one now! He was leaning over the marble balustrade, a painfully thin boy with a neck long enough to give him a resemblance to a stork, and a nose large enough to show even at this distance. A lot of lank, reddish hair. No mistaking Cato the Censor's brood!

  All of these thoughts indicated one thing about Caesar his mother had not catalogued during her reverie: he adored gossip and forgot none of it.

  "Honored priest, my master is ready to see you." Caesar turned away with a grin and a cheerful wave up to the boy on Drusus's balcony, hugely amused when the wave was not returned. Young Cato was probably too amazed to wave back; there would be few in Sulla's temporary dwelling with the time to make overtures of friendship to a poor little storky boy who was the descendant of a Tusculan squire and a Celtiberian slave.

  Though he was prepared for the sight of Sulla the Dictator, Caesar still found himself shocked. No wonder he hadn't sought Mater out! Nor would I if I were he, thought Caesar, and walked forward as quietly as his wooden-soled clogs permitted.

  Sulla's initial reaction was that he looked upon a total stranger; but this was due to the ugly red-and-purple cape and the peculiar effect the creamy ivory helmet created, of someone with a shaven skull.

  "Take all that stuff off," said Sulla, and returned his gaze to the mass of papers on his desk.

  When he looked up again the priestling was gone. In his place there stood his son. The hairs bristled on Sulla's arms, and on the back of his neck; he emitted a sound like air oozing out of a bladder and stumbled to his feet. The golden hair, the wide blue eyes, the long Caesar face, all that height... And then Sulla's tear-clouded vision assimilated the differences; Aurelia's high sharp cheekbones with the hollows beneath and Aurelia's exquisite mouth with the creases in the corners. Older than Young Sulla had been when he died, more man than boy. Oh, Lucius Cornelius, my son, why did you have to die?