The Grass Crown (38 page)

Very difficult getting foreign ideas into the King’s head, thought Neoptolemus. Has he grasped the point of the road? Why does he not see it? I do! We’re both Pontines, neither of us was educated abroad, our backgrounds are similar as far as blood goes. In actual fact, his is the richer exposure to various places. Yet he can be so blind to the significance of some things I see at once. Though other things he sees more quickly than I do. Different minds, I suppose. Different ways of thinking. Perhaps when a man is a complete autocrat, his mind shifts in some way? He is no fool, my cousin Mithridates. A pity then that he understands the Romans so little. Much as he would deny the charge vigorously, he isn’t even interested in understanding the Romans. Most of his conclusions about them are based on his bizarre adventures in Asia Province, and that is not the excellent background he thinks it is. How can the rest of us make him see what we see?

The King’s stay in the blue palace at Eusebeia Mazaca was brief; on the day following his arrival he led his army out in Sulla’s direction, all hundred thousand soldiers. No need to worry about roads here! Though there was an occasional hill to climb and the outlandish gorges of tufa towers to skirt round, the way was easy for men on the march. Mithridates was satisfied with his progress, one hundred and sixty stades in the day; not unless he had seen it through his own eyes would he have believed that a Roman army marching across the same roadless terrain could have covered over twice that distance without being really extended.

But Sulla didn’t move. His camp lay in the midst of a huge expanse of flat ground and he had used his time in fortifying it formidably, despite the fact that the Cappadocian lack of forests had meant fetching the timber from the Cilician Gates. Thus when Mithridates came over the horizon he saw a structure, perfectly square, enclosing a space some thirty-two square stades in area within massive embankments, topped by a spiked palisade ten feet high, and having in front of its walls three ditches, the outermost twenty feet wide and filled with water, the middle one fifteen feet wide and filled with sharpened stakes, and the innermost twenty feet wide and filled with water. There were, his scouts informed him, four paths across the ditches, one to each of the four gates, which were placed in the center of each side of the square.

It was the first time in his life that Mithridates had seen a Roman camp. He wanted to gape, but could not because there were too many eyes upon him. That he could take it he was sure—but at enormous cost. So he sat his vast army down and rode out himself to look at Sulla’s fortress at close quarters.

“My lord King, a herald from the Romans,” said one of his officers, coming to find him as he rode slowly along one side of Sulla’s admirably engineered stronghold.

“What do they want?” asked Mithridates, frowning at the wall and the palisade, the tall watchtowers which marched along it at frequent intervals.

“The proconsul Lucius Cornelius Sulla requests a parley.”

“I agree to that. Where, and when?”

“On the path leading to the Roman camp’s front gate—that path to your right, Great King. Just you and he, the herald says.”

“When?”

“Now, Great One.”

The King kicked his horse to the right, eager to see this Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and not at all afraid; nothing he had heard about Romans suggested the kind of treachery that would, under a truce, fell him with a spear as he walked unguarded to a rendezvous. So when he reached the path he slid down from his horse without thinking things through, and stopped, annoyed at his own obtuseness. He mustn’t let a Roman do to him again what Gaius Marius had done to him—look down on him! Back onto the horse he climbed. He would look down on Lucius Cornelius Sulla! But the horse refused to tread this roadway, eyes rolling white at sight of the perilous ditches on either side. For a moment the King fought the animal, then decided this would harm his image even more. Back he came, back off the horse he slid, and now he walked alone to its middle, where the ditches literally stuffed with sharpened pointed stakes yawned like mouths full of teeth.

The gate opened, a man slid round it and walked toward him. Quite a little fellow compared to his own splendid height, the King was pleased to see—but very well put together. The Roman was clad in a plain steel cuirass shaped to his torso, wore the double kilt of leather straps called pteryges, a scarlet tunic, and, flowing out behind him, a scarlet cape. Bareheaded, his red-gold hair blazed in the sun, stirred by a little wind. King Mithridates couldn’t take his eyes off it, for in all his life he had never seen hair that color, even on the Celtic Galatians. Nor such ice-white skin, visible between the hem just above the Roman’s knees and his sturdy unornamented boots midway up impressively muscled calves, visible down the length of his arms, visible on neck and face too. Ice-white! No atom of color in it!

And then Lucius Cornelius Sulla was close enough for the King to see his face, and then he was close enough for the King to see his eyes. The King literally shivered. Apollo! Apollo in the guise of a Roman! The face was so strong, so godlike, so awful in its majesty—no smooth-faced simpering Greek statue, this, but the god as the god must surely be, so long after his creation. A man-god in the prime of his life, full of power. A Roman. A Roman!

Sulla had gone out to this meeting completely sure of himself, for he had listened to Gaius Marius describe his own encounter with the King of Pontus; between the two of them, they had got his measure. It hadn’t occurred to him that his very appearance would throw the King off balance—nor did he, seeing this was so, understand exactly why. Exactly why didn’t matter. He simply resolved to use this unexpected advantage.

“What are you doing in Cappadocia, King Mithridates?” he asked.

“Cappadocia belongs to me,” the King said, but not in the roaring voice he had originally intended to use before he set eyes on the Roman Apollo; it came out rather small and weak, and he knew it, and he hated himself for it.

“Cappadocia belongs to the Cappadocians.”

“The Cappadocians are the same people as the Pontines.”

“How can that be, when they have had their own line of kings for as many hundreds of years as the Pontines?”

“Their kings have been foreigners, not Cappadocians.”

“In what way?”

“They are Seleucids from Syria.”

Sulla shrugged. “Odd, then, King Mithridates, that the Cappadocian king I have inside these camp walls behind me doesn’t look a scrap like a Seleucid from Syria. Or like you! Nor is his genealogy Syrian, Seleucid or otherwise. King Ariobarzanes is a Cappadocian, and chosen by his own people in place of your son Ariarathes Eusebes.”

Mithridates started. Gordius had never told him Marius found out who was father to King Ariarathes Eusebes; Sulla’s statement seemed to him prescient, unnatural. Yet one more evidence of the Roman Apollo.

“King Ariarathes Eusebes is dead, he died during the invasion of the Armenians,” said Mithridates, still in that small meek voice. “The Cappadocians now have a Cappadocian king. His name is Gordius, and I am here to ensure he remains king.”

“Gordius is your creature, King Mithridates, as is only to be expected in a father-in-law whose daughter is the Queen of Pontus,” said Sulla evenly. “Gordius is not the king chosen by the Cappadocians. He is the king you chose through the agency of your son-in-law Tigranes. Ariobarzanes is the rightful king.”

Yet more inside knowledge! Who was this Lucius Cornelius Sulla, if not Apollo? “Ariobarzanes is a pretender!”

“Not according to the Senate and People of Rome,” said Sulla, pressing his advantage. “I am here on commission from the Senate and People of Rome to ensure that King Ariobarzanes is reinstated, and that Pontus—and Armenia!—stay out of Cappadocian lands.”

“It is no business of Rome’s!” cried the King, gathering courage as his temper frayed.

“Everything in the world is Rome’s business,” said Sulla, and gauged the time right to strike. “Go home, King Mithridates.”

“Cappadocia is as much my home as Pontus!”

“No, it is not. Go home to Pontus.”

“And are you going to make me, with your pathetic little army?” sneered the King, angry now indeed. “Look out there, Lucius Cornelius Sulla! A hundred thousand men!”

“A hundred thousand barbarians,” said Sulla scornfully. “I’ll eat them.”

“I’ll fight! I warn you, I’ll fight!”

Sulla turned his shoulder, preparing to walk away, and said over it, “Oh, stop posturing and go home!” And walked away. At the gate he turned back and said more loudly, “Go home, King Mithridates. Eight days from now I march to Eusebeia Mazaca to put King Ariobarzanes back on his throne. If you oppose me, I’ll annihilate your army and kill you. Not twice the number of men I can see would stop me.”

“You don’t even have Roman soldiers!” shouted the King.

Sulla smiled dreadfully. “Roman enough,” he said. “They have been equipped and trained by a Roman—and they will fight like Romans, so much I promise you. Go home!”

Back to his imperial tent stormed the King, in such a fury that no one dared speak to him, even Neoptolemus. Once inside he didn’t pause, but went straight to his private room at the back, and there sat upon a kingly seat, his purple cloak thrown over his head. No, Sulla wasn’t Apollo! He was just a Roman. But what sort of men were Romans, that they could look like Apollo? Or, like Gaius Marius, bulk so large and so kingly that they never doubted their power, their authority? Romans he had seen in Asia Province, even—in the distance—the governor; they had seemed, though arrogant, ordinary men. But two Romans only had he met, Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Which kind of Roman was the real Roman? His common sense said the Asia Province Roman. Whereas his bones said, Marius and Sulla. After all, he was a great king, descended from Herakles, and from Darius of Persia. Therefore those who came against him were bound to be great.

Why couldn’t he command an army in person? Why couldn’t he understand the art? Why did he have to leave it to men like his cousins Archelaus and Neoptolemus? There were some sons with promise—but they had ambitious mothers. Where could he turn and be sure! How could he deal with the great Romans, the ones who beat hundreds of thousands of soldiers?

Rage dissolved into tears; the King wept vainly until his despair passed into resignation, moods alien to his nature. Accept he must that the great Romans could not be beaten. And his own ambitions could not in turn come to pass—unless the gods smiled on Pontus by giving the great Romans something to do much closer to Rome than Cappadocia. If the day should come when the only Romans sent against Pontus were ordinary men, then Mithridates would move. Until then, Cappadocia, Bithynia and Macedonia would have to wait. He threw off his purple cloak, got to his feet.

Gordius and Neoptolemus were waiting in the outer room of the tent; when the King appeared in the aperture leading to his private domain, the two men leaped up from their chairs.

“Move the army,” said Mithridates curtly. “We go back to Pontus. Let the Roman put Ariobarzanes back on the Cappadocian throne! I am young. I have time. I will wait until Rome is occupied elsewhere, and then I will march into the west.”

“But what about me?” wailed Gordius.

The King bit his forefinger, staring at Gordius fixedly. “I think it’s time I was rid of you, father-in-law,” he said, lifted his chin and shouted, “Guards! Inside!”

In they spilled.

“Take him away and kill him,” said the King, waving at the cringing Gordius, then turned to Neoptolemus, standing white-faced and trembling. “What are you waiting for?” he asked. “Move the army! Now!”

•        •        •

“Well, well!” said Sulla to Young Sulla. “He’s packing up.”

They were standing atop the watchtower by the main gate, which looked north to the camp of Mithridates.

One part of Young Sulla was sorry, but the larger part was very glad. “It’s better this way, Father, isn’t it?”

“At this stage, I think so.”

“We couldn’t have beaten him, could we?”

“Yes, of course we could have!” said Sulla heartily. “Would I bring my son on campaign with me if I didn’t think I’d win? He’s packing up and leaving for one reason only—because he knows we would have won. A bit of a backwoods hayseed our Mithridates might be, but he can recognize military excellence and a better man when he sees them, even though it is for the first time. It’s lucky for us, actually, that he has been so isolated. The only role-model these eastern potentates have is Alexander the Great, who by Roman military standards is hopelessly outdated.”

“What was the King of Pontus like?” asked the son curiously.

“Like?” Sulla thought for a moment before replying. “Do you know, I am hard put to say! Very unsure of himself, certainly, and therefore capable of being manipulated. He wouldn’t cut an imposing figure in the Forum, but that’s his foreignness. Like any tyrant, used to getting his own way—and I include brats in the nursery. I suppose if I had to sum him up in one word, I’d call him a yokel. But he’s king of all he surveys, he’s dangerous, and he’s quite capable of learning. Just as well he didn’t have Jugurtha’s exposure to Rome and Romans at an early age—or Hannibal’s sophistication, come to that. Until he met Gaius Marius—and me—I imagine he was satisfied with himself. Today he isn’t. But that won’t sit well with friend Mithridates! He’ll set out to look for ways to best us at our own game, is my prediction. He’s very proud. And very conceited. He won’t rest until he’s tested his mettle against Rome. But he won’t run the risk of doing that until he’s absolutely sure he can win. Today he isn’t sure. A wise decision on his part to withdraw, Young Sulla! I would have taken him and his army to pieces.”

Young Sulla rolled a fascinated eye at his father, amazed at his father’s sureness, his conviction he was right. “So many?”

“Numbers mean nothing, my son,” said Sulla, turning to leave the watchtower. “There are at least a dozen ways I could have rolled him up. He thinks in numbers. But he hasn’t yet arrived at the real answer, which is to use what you have as one single unit. If he had decided to fight and I had humored him by leading my forces out to face him, he would simply have ordered a charge. Everyone in his army would have rushed at us together. that’s so easy to deal with! As for his taking my camp—impossible! But he’s dangerous. Do you know why I say that, Young Sulla?”