The First Man in Rome (98 page)

The result was a quarrel between the two women so bitter and acrimonious that the children wept, the slaves fled, and Sulla shut himself inside his
tablinum
calling down cursesupon the heads of all women. What snatches of the argument he overheard indicated that the subject was not new, nor this confrontation the first. The children, Marcia alleged in a voice loud enough to be heard as far away as the temple of Magna Mater, were being completely ignored by their mother. Julilla retorted in a scream audible as far away as the Circus Maximus that Marcia had stolen the children's affections, so what could she expect?

The battle raged for longer than any altercation so verbally violent should have—another indication, Sulla decided, that the subject and the argument had been thoroughly explored on many earlier occasions. They were proceeding almost by rote. It ended in the atrium just outside Sulla's study door, where Marcia informed Julilla that she was taking the children and their nanny for a long walk, and she didn't know when she'd be back, but Julilla had better be sober when she did come back.

Hands pressed over his ears to shut out the pathetic sobs and pleas for peace both children were making of their mother and grandmother, Sulla tried to concentrate upon what beautiful children they were. He was still filled with the delight of seeing them again after so long; Cornelia Sulla was over five now, and little Lucius Sulla was four. People in their own right—and quite old enough to suffer, as he well knew from the memories of his own childhood, buried yet never forgotten. If there was any mercy in his abandonment of his German twin sons, it lay in the fact that when he left them they were still very young babies, heads nodding up and down, mouths blowing bubbles, every kink in every bone from head to toe stuffed with dimples. It would be far harder to part with his Roman children because they were old enough to be people. He pitied them deeply. And loved them deeply too, a very different kind of feeling from any he had ever experienced for either man or woman. Selfless and pure, untainted and rounded.

His door burst open; Julilla rushed into the room with draperies swirling, her fists knotted, her face dyed a dark rose from rage. And wine.

"Did you hear that?" she demanded.

Sulla laid his pen down. "How could I help hearing it?" he asked in a tired voice. "The whole Palatine heard."

"That old turnip! That dried-up old troublemaker! How dare she accuse me of neglecting my children?"

Do I, or don't I? asked Sulla of himself. Why am I putting up with her? Why don't I get out my little box of white powder from the Pisae foundry and dose her wine until her teeth fall out of her head and her tongue curls up into a smoking string and her tits swell up like puffballs and explode? Why don't I find a nice wet oak tree and harvest a few flawless mushrooms and feed them to her until she pours blood from every orifice? Why don't I give her the kiss she's panting for, and snap her skinny nasty neck the way I did Clitumna's? How many men have I killed with sword, dagger, arrow, poison, stone, axe, club, thong, hands? What does she have none of those others had? He found the answer at once, of course. Julilla had given him his dream. Julilla had given him his luck. And she was a patrician Roman, blood of his blood. He'd sooner kill Hermana.

Even so, words couldn't kill her, this tough, sinewy Roman madam, so words he could use.

"You do neglect your children," he said. "That's why I brought your mother to live here in the first place."

She gasped stagily, choked, wrapped her hands about her throat. "Oh! Oh! How dare you? I have never neglected my children, never!"

'' Rubbish. You've never cared a scrap for them," he said in the same tired patient voice he seemed to have adopted since he set foot in this awful, blighted house. "The only thing you care about, Julilla, is a flagon of wine."

"And who can blame me?" she asked, hands falling. "Who can honestly blame me? Married to a man who doesn't want me, who can't even get it up when we're in the same bed and I've got it in my mouth sucking and licking until my jaws crack!"

"If we're going to be explicit, would you please close the door?" he asked.

"Why? So the precious servants can't hear? What a filthy hypocrite you are, Sulla! And whose is the shame, yours or mine? Why isn't it ever yours? Your reputation as a lover is far too well established in this town for my miserable failure to have you classified impotent! It's only
me
you don't want!
Me!
Your own wife! I've never so much as looked at another man, and what thanks do I get? After nearly two years away, you can't even get it up when I turn myself into an
irrumator
!"
The huge hollow yellow eyes were bleeding tears. "What did I ever do? Why don't you love me? Why don't you even want me? Oh, Sulla, look at me with eyes of love, touch me with hands of love, and I will never need another sip of wine as long as I live! How
can
I love you the way I love you without striking so much as one tiny little spark in return?"

"Perhaps that's a part of the problem," he said, clinically detached. "I don't like being loved excessively. It's not right. In fact, it's unhealthy."

"Then tell me
how
to stop loving you!" she wept. "
I
don't know how! Do you think if I could stop, I wouldn't? In less time than it takes to strike that spark from a good dry flint, I'd stop! I
pray
to stop! I yearn to stop! But I can't stop. I love you more than I love life itself."

He sighed. "Perhaps the answer is to finish growing up. You look and act like an adolescent. In mind and body, you're still sixteen. Only you're not, Julilla. You're twenty-four. You have a child of five, and another going on for four."

"Maybe sixteen was the last time I was ever happy," she said, rubbing her palms around her running cheeks.

"If you haven't been happy since you were sixteen, the blame for it can hardly be laid at my door," said Sulla.

"Nothing's
ever
your fault, is it?"

"Absolutely true," he said, looking superior.

"Well, what about other women?"

"What about them?"

"Is it possible that one of the reasons why you haven't shown any interest in me since you came back is because you've got a woman tucked away in Gaul?"

"Not a woman," he corrected gently, "a wife. And not in Gaul. In Germania."

Her mouth dropped open, she gaped.
"A wife?"

"Well, according to the German custom, anyway. And twin boys about four months old now." He closed his eyes, the pain in them too private a thing to let her see. "I miss her badly. Isn't that odd?"

Julilla managed to shut her mouth and swallow convulsively. "Is she that beautiful?" she whispered.

His pale eyes opened, surprised. "Beautiful?
Hermana?
No, not at all! She's dumpy and in her thirties. Not even one hundredth as beautiful as you. Not even as blonde. Not even the daughter of a chief, let alone a king. Just a barbarian."

"Why?
^”

Sulla shook his head. "I don't know. Except that I liked her a great deal."

"What does she have that I haven't?"

"A good pair of breasts," said Sulla, shrugging, "but I'm not partial to breasts, so it can't be that. She worked hard. She never complained. She never expected anything of me—no, that's not it. Better to say, she never expected me to be what I'm not." He nodded, smiled with obvious fondness. "Yes, I think that must be it. She belonged to herself, and so she didn't burden me with herself. You're a lead weight chained about my neck. Hermana was a pair of wings strapped to my feet."

Without another word Julilla turned and walked out of the study. Sulla got up, followed her to the door, and closed it.

But not enough time elapsed for Sulla to compose himself sufficiently to resume his doodling—for write sensibly he couldn't that morning—before the door opened again.

His steward stood there, giving a superb imitation of an inanimate block of wood.

"Yes?"

"A caller, Lucius Cornelius. Are you in?"

"Who is it?"

"I would have given you his name,
dominus,
if I knew it," said the steward stiffly. "The caller preferred to charge me with a message for you. 'Scylax sends greetings.' "

Sulla's face cleared like a breath from the surface of a polished mirror; a delighted smile dawned. One of the old gang! One of the mimes, the comedians, the actors he used to know! Oh, terrific! This nincompoop steward Julilla had bought wouldn't know, of course he wouldn't know. Clitumna's slaves weren't good enough for Julilla. "Well, bring him in!"

He would have known who it was anywhere, anytime.

And yet—how much he had changed! From boy into man.

"Metrobius," Sulla said, getting to his feet, his eyes flicking to the door automatically to make sure it was shut. It was. The windows were not shut, but they didn't matter, for there was an ironclad rule in Sulla's house: that no one was ever to stand where they could see into Sulla's study through the colonnade windows.

He must be twenty-two now, thought Sulla. Quite tall for a Greek. The long mane of black curls had been barbered neatly into a manly cap, and where the skin of his cheeks and chin had once been milky-smooth, now it displayed the blue shadow of a heavy beard kept closely shaven. He still had a profile like a Praxiteles Apollo, and something of the same epicene repose, a Nicias painted marble so true to life it might step down from its plinth and begin to walk, yet remained still folded away within itself, keeping the secret of its mystery, its wellsprings.

The marmoreal control of perfect beauty held perfectly broke then; Metrobius looked at Sulla with perfect love, and smilingly extended his arms.

The tears stood forth in Sulla's eyes; his mouth shook. As he came around it, the corner of his desk struck his hip, but Sulla didn't notice. He just walked into Metrobius's arms and let them close about him, and put his chin on Metrobius's shoulder, and his arms about Metrobius's back. And felt as if he had come home at last. So the kiss when it happened was exquisite, the understanding heart grown up, the act of faith made without cognizance, without pain of any kind.

"My boy, my beautiful boy!" said Sulla, and wept in simple gratitude that some things did not change.

Outside Sulla's open study windows Julilla stood and watched her husband walk into the lovely young man's arms, watched them kiss, heard the words of love which passed between them, watched as they moved together to the couch and sank upon it, and began the initial intimacies of a relationship so old and so satisfying to them both that this was merely a homecoming. No one needed to tell her that here was the real reason for her husband's neglect, and for her own drinking, and for her revenge in neglecting her children. Her husband's children.

Before they could loosen each other's clothing Julilla turned away, and walked with head held high and eyes tearless into the bedroom she shared with Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Her husband. Beyond it was a smaller cubicle they used as a clothes repository, more cluttered now that Sulla was home again, for his dress-parade armor was suspended from a T-shaped frame, its helmet on a special stand, and his sword with its ivory eagle's head handle hung upon the wall complete with scabbard and baldric.

Getting the sword down was easy; getting it free from its sheath and belt was more difficult. But she managed at last, and drew in her breath sharply when the blade sheared her hand open to the bone, so well honed was it. She experienced a twinge of surprise that she could actually feel physical pain at this moment, then dismissed both surprise and pain as irrelevant. Without hesitation she picked up the sword by its ivory eagle, turned it in upon herself, and walked into the wall.

It was badly done. She fell in a sprawling tangle of blood and draperies with the sword buried in her belly, her heart beating, beating, beating, the rasp of her own breathing heavy in her ears like someone stealing up behind her to take life or virtue. Neither virtue nor life did she own anymore, so what could it matter? She felt the dreadful agony of it then, and the warmth of her own blood on her skin as it quit her. But she was a Julius Caesar; she would not cry out for help, or regret this decision for what little time she had remaining. Not a thought of her two little children crossed her mind; all she could think of was her own foolishness, that for many years she had loved a man who loved men.

Sufficient reason to die. She wouldn't live to be laughed at, jeered at, made a mockery of by all those lucky lucky women out there who were married to men who loved women. As the blood flowed away carrying life along with it, her burning mind began to cool, and slow, and petrify. Oh, how wonderful, to stop loving him at last! No more torment, no more anguish, no more humiliation, no more wine. She had asked him to show her how to stop loving him, and he had shown her. So kind to her he had finally been, her darling Sulla. Her last lucid moments of thought were about her children; at least in them, something of herself she would leave behind. So she waded into the sweet shallows of the ocean Death wishing her children long life, and much happiness.

Sulla returned to his desk and sat down. "There's wine; pour me some," he said to Metrobius.

How like the boy the man was, once animation stole into his face! Easier then to remember that once the boy had offered to give up every luxury for the chance to live in penury with his darling Sulla.

Smiling softly, Metrobius brought the wine and sat down in the client's chair. "I know what you're going to say, Lucius Cornelius. We can't make a habit of this."

"Yes. Among other things." Sulla sipped his wine, then looked at Metrobius sternly. "It
isn't
possible, dearest lad. Just sometimes, when the need or the pain or whatever it is becomes too much to bear. I'm the width of a whisker away from everything I want, which means I can't have you too. If this were Greece, yes. But it isn't. It's Rome. If I were the First Man in Rome, yes. But I'm not. Gaius Marius is."