The Grass Crown (86 page)

“Yes, Gnaeus Pompeius, I do expect to get round to that,” said Sulla easily. “I suppose it ought by rights to have been discussed yesterday when the House ratified all the provincial governorships, but—as you’ve probably gathered from my speech today—I look on this conflict as a civil war, and would rather see the commands debated in a regular meeting.”

“Oh well, yes, I see your point,” said Pompey Strabo, not in the manner of one abashed by the crassness of his question, but rather in the manner of one who had no idea of protocol.

“In which case?” asked Sulla politely, noticing out of the corner of his eye that Marius had dragged himself off in the company of Young Caesar, who must have waited patiently outside the doors.

“If I include the troops Publius Sulpicius brought from Italian Gaul the year before last—as well as the troops Sextus Julius brought from Africa—I have ten full legions in the field,” said Pompey Strabo. “As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, Lucius Cornelius—since I imagine you’re in similar circumstances yourself—most of my legions haven’t been paid in a year.”

Down went the corners of Sulla’s mouth in a rueful smile. “I do indeed know what you mean, Gnaeus Pompeius!”

“Now to some extent I’ve canceled that debt out, Lucius Cornelius. The soldiers got everything Asculum Picentum had to offer, from furniture to bronze coins. Clothes. Women’s trinkets. Paltry, down to the last Priapus lamp. But it made them happy, as did the other occasions when I was able to give them whatever was there to be had. Paltry stuff. But enough for common soldiers. So that’s one way I was able to cancel the debt.” He paused, then said, “But the other way affects me personally.”

“Indeed?”

“Four of those ten legions are mine. They were raised among the men of my own estates in northern Picenum and southern Umbria, and to the last soldier they’re my clients. So they don’t expect to be paid any more than they expect Rome to pay them. They’re content with whatever pickings they can glean.”

Sulla was looking alert. “Do go on!”

“Now,” said Pompey Strabo reflectively, rubbing his chin with his big right hand, “I’m quite happy with things the way they are. Though some things will change because I’m not consul anymore.”

“Things like, Gnaeus Pompeius?”

“I’ll need a proconsular imperium, for one thing. And my command in the north confirmed.” The hand which had caressed his jaw now swept in a wide circle. “You can have all the rest, Lucius Cornelius. I don’t want it. All I want is my own corner of our lovely Roman world. Picenum and Umbria.”

“In return for which, you won’t send the Treasury a wages bill for four of your ten legions, and will reduce the bill you send in on behalf of the other six?”

“You’re wide awake on all counts, Lucius Cornelius.”

Out went Sulla’s hand. “You’ve got a deal, Gnaeus Pompeius! I’d give Picenum and Umbria to Saturninus if it meant Rome didn’t have to find the full wages for ten legions.”

“Oh, not to Saturninus, even if his family did originally come from Picenum! I’ll look after them better than he would.”

“I’m sure you will, Gnaeus Pompeius.”

Thus it was that when the question of apportioning out the various commands for the concluding operations of the war against the Italians came up in the House, Pompey Strabo got what he wanted without opposition from the consul with the Grass Crown. Or opposition from anyone else. Sulla had lobbied strenuously. Though Pompey Strabo was not a man of Sulla’s kind—he utterly lacked subtlety or sophistication—he was known to be as dangerous as a bear at bay and as ruthless as an oriental potentate, to both of which he bore a strong resemblance. The tale of his doings in Asculum Picentum had filtered back to Rome through a medium as novel as it was unexpected; an eighteen-year-old contubernalis named Marcus Tullius Cicero had written an account of them in a letter to one of his only two living preceptors, Quintus Mucius Scaevola, and Scaevola had not been silent, though his loquaciousness was more because of the literary merit in the letter than Pompey Strabo’s vile and monstrous behavior.

“Brilliant!” was Scaevola’s verdict on the letter, and, “What else can one expect from such a blood-and-guts butcher?” on the letter’s contents.

Though Sulla retained supreme command in the southern and the central theaters, actual command in the south went to Metellus Pius the Piglet; Gaius Cosconius had sustained a minor wound which turned septic, and had retired from active service. The Piglet’s second-in-command was Mamercus Aemilius Lepidus Livianus, who had relented and got himself elected a quaestor. As Publius Gabinius was dead and his younger brother, Aulus, was too young to be given a senior command, Lucania went to Gnaeus Papirius Carbo, generally felt to be an excellent choice.

In the midst of this debate—rendered more enjoyable by the knowledge that Rome had basically won the war already—Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus died. This meant proceedings had to be suspended in House and Comitia and the money found for a State funeral for one who was, at the time of his death, far richer than Rome’s Treasury. Sulla conducted the election for his successor and for his priesthood in a mood of bitter resentment, for when he had assumed the consul’s curule chair he had also assumed the largest part of the responsibility for Rome’s fiscal problems, and it angered him to pay out good money for one in no need of it. Nor, before Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus, had there been any need to stand the expense of an election; he it was as a tribune of the plebs who carried the lex Domitia de sacerdotiis, the law changing the manner of appointing priests and augurs from an internal co-optation to an external election. Quintus Mucius Scaevola—already a priest—became the new Pontifex Maximus, which meant that Ahenobarbus’s priesthood went to a new member of the College of Pontifices, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius the Piglet. At least in that respect, thought Sulla, some justice was done. When Metellus Piggle-wiggle had died, his priesthood had been voted to the young Gaius Aurelius Cotta, a fine example of how election to office could destroy a family’s right to offices which had always been hereditary.

The obsequies over, business resumed in Senate and Comitia. Pompey Strabo asked for—and got—his legates Poplicola and Brutus Damasippus, though his other legate, Gnaeus Octavius Ruso, announced himself better able to serve Rome within Rome, a statement which everyone took to mean he would seek the consulship at the end of the year. Cinna and Cornutus were left to continue their operations in the lands of the Marsi, and Servius Sulpicius Galba remained in the field against the Marrucini, the Vestini, and the Paeligni.

“All in all, a good assortment,” said Sulla to his consular colleague, Quintus Pompeius Rufus.

The occasion was a family dinner at the Pompeius Rufus mansion to celebrate the fact that Cornelia Sulla was pregnant again. This news had not smitten Sulla with the joy it obviously did Aelia and all the Pompeii Rufi, but it did resign him to family duties like finally setting eyes on his granddaughter, who—according to her other grandfather, his fellow consul—was the most exquisitely perfect baby ever born.

Now five months old, Pompeia was certainly beautiful, Sulla had to admit to himself. She had masses of dark red curls, black brows and black lashes so long and thick they were like fans, and enormous swamp-green eyes. Her skin was creamy, her mouth a sweet red bow, and when she smiled she displayed a dimple in one rosy cheek. Though Sulla admitted that he was no expert on babies, to him Pompeia seemed a very sluggish and stupid sort of child who only became animated when something gold and glittery was dangled under her nose. An omen, thought Sulla, chuckling silently.

His daughter was happy, so much was evident; on a far distant plane this quite pleased Sulla, who didn’t love her, but was prone to like her when she didn’t do anything to annoy him. And sometimes in her face he would catch an echo of her dead brother, some swift expression or lifting of her eyes, and then he would remember that her brother had loved her very much. How unfair life was! Why did it have to be Cornelia Sulla, a useless girl, who grew up in the bloom of health, and Young Sulla die untimely? It ought to have been the other way around. In a properly ordered world, the paterfamilias would have been offered a choice.

He never dredged his two German sons sired when he had lived among the Germans out of the back of his mind, never longed to see them or thought of them in any way as replacements for that beloved dead son of Julilla’s. For they were not Roman, and their mother was a barbarian. Always it was Young Sulla, always an emptiness impossible to fill. And there she was under his nose, the daughter he would have given over to death in less than one beat of his heart, could he only have Young Sulla back.

“How delightful to see everything turn out so well,” said Aelia to him as they walked home, unattended by a servant escort.

Because Sulla’s thoughts were still revolving around life’s unfairness in taking his son from him and leaving him only a useless girl, poor Aelia could not have made an unwiser remark.

He struck back instantly, with total venom. “Consider yourself divorced as of this moment!” he hissed.

She stopped in her tracks. “Oh, Lucius Cornelius, I beg of you, think again!” she cried, stunned at this thunderbolt.

“Find another home. You don’t belong in mine.” And Sulla turned to walk off toward the Forum, leaving Aelia standing on the Clivus Victoriae completely alone.

When she recovered sufficiently from the blow to be able to think, she too turned around, but not to walk to the Forum. She went back to the house of Quintus Pompeius Rufus.

“Please, may I see my daughter?” she asked the slave on door duty, who looked at her in bewilderment. Scant moments before he had let out a lovely woman wrapped in a glow of content—now here she was again looking as if she was going to die, so grey and blighted was her face.

When he offered to take her to his master, she asked if she might go to Cornelia Sulla’s sitting room instead, see her daughter in private and without disturbing anyone else.

“What is it, Mama?” Cornelia Sulla asked lightly as she came through the door. And stopped at sight of that terrible face, and asked again, but in a very different tone, “What is it, Mama? Oh, what is it?”

“He’s divorced me,” said Aelia dully. “He told me I didn’t belong in his home, so I didn’t dare go home. He meant it.”

“Mama! Why? When? Where?”

“Just now, on the street.”

Cornelia Sulla sat down limply beside her stepmother, the only mother she had ever known beyond vague memories of a thin complaining wisp who was more attached to her wine cup than her children. Of course there had been nearly two years of Grandmother Marcia, but Grandmother Marcia hadn’t wanted to be a mother again and had reigned over the nursery harshly, without love. So when Aelia had come to live with them, both Young Sulla and Cornelia Sulla had thought her utterly wonderful and loved her as a mother.

Taking Aelia’s cold hand, Cornelia Sulla looked into the vortex of her father’s mind, those frightful and stunningly quick changes of mood, the violence which could come leaping out of him like lava out of a volcano, the coldness which gave no hope or light to human heart. “Oh, he is a monster!” said his daughter between her teeth.

“No,” said Aelia tiredly, “just a man who has never been happy. He doesn’t know who he is, and he doesn’t know what he wants. Or perhaps he does know, but dare not be it and want it. I’ve always known he’d end in divorcing me. Yet I did think he’d give me some warning—a change in his manner or—or something! You see, he was finished with me inside his mind before ever anything could begin. So when the years went by, I started to hope—it doesn’t matter. All considered, I’ve had a longer run than I expected to.”

“Cry, Mama! You’ll feel better.”

But what came out was a humorless laugh. “Oh no. I cried too much after our boy died. That was when he died too.”

“He’s not going to give you anything, Mama. I know him! He’s a miser. He won’t give you a thing.”

“Yes, I am aware of that.”

“But you do have a dowry.”

“I gave him that a long time ago.”

Cornelia Sulla drew herself up with great dignity. “You will live with me, Mama. I refuse to desert you. Quintus Pompeius will see the justice of it.”

“No, Cornelia. Two women in a single house is one too many, and you already have the second one in the person of your mother-in-law. A very nice woman. She loves you. But she won’t thank you for wishing a third woman on her.”

“But what can you do?” the young woman cried.

“I can stay here tonight in your sitting room, and think about my next step tomorrow,” said Aelia calmly. “Don’t tell your father-in-law yet, please. This will be a very awkward situation for him, you know. If you must, tell your husband. I must write Lucius Cornelius a note to say where I am. Could you have someone take it round straight away?”

“Of course, Mama.” The daughter of any other man might have added words to the effect that in the morning he was sure to change his mind, but not Sulla’s daughter; she knew her father better.

With the dawn came an answer from Sulla. Aelia broke its seal with steady hands.

“What does he say?” asked Cornelia Sulla tensely.

“'I divorce you on the grounds of barrenness.'”

“Oh, Mama, how unfair! He married you because you were barren!”

“You know, Cornelia, he’s very clever,” said Aelia with some admiration. “Since he has chosen to divorce me on those grounds, I have no redress at law. I can’t claim my dowry, I can’t ask for a pension. I’ve been married to him for twelve years. When I married him I was still of an age to bear children. But I had none with my first husband, and none with him. No court would uphold me.”

“Then you must live with me,” said Cornelia Sulla in determined tones. “Last night I told Quintus Pompeius what had happened. He thinks it would work out well if you were to live here. If you were not so nice, perhaps it wouldn’t. But it will work out. I know it!”

“Your poor husband!” said Aelia, smiling. “What else could he say? What else can his poor father say when he is told? They’re both good men, and generous ones. But I know what I’m going to do, Cornelia, and it’s by far the best thing.”