The First Man in Rome

by Colleen McCullough

  Despite the effect the downpour had had on the Via Tiburtina (the densely packed layer of gravel, tufa dust, and sand on top of the paving stones had been eroded), the two in the gig were thoroughly enjoying themselves. The sun was hot but the breeze cooling, Nicopolis’s parasol was large enough to shade Sulla’s snow-white skin as well as her own olive hide, and the mules turned out to be a willingly tractable pair. Too sensible to force the pace, Sulla let his team find their own, and the miles trotted by delightfully.

  To go all the way to Tibur and back was impossible in one day, but Sulla’s favorite spot lay well short of the climb up to Tibur itself. Some distance out of Rome was a forest that stretched all the way into the ranges which rose, ever increasing in height, to the massif of the Great Rock, Italy’s highest mountain. This forest cut diagonally across the route of the road for perhaps a mile before wandering off crosscountry; the road then entered the Anio River valley, most fertile, eminently arable.

  However, the mile or so of forest was harder ground, and here Sulla left the road, directing the mules down an un-paved wagon track which dived into the trees and finally petered out.

  “Here we are,” said Sulla, jumping down and coming round to help Nicopolis, who found herself stiff and a little sore. “I know it doesn’t look promising, but walk a little way further with me and I’ll show you a place well worth the ride.”

  First he unharnessed the mules and hobbled them, then he shoved the gig off the track into the shade of some bushes and took the picnic hamper out of it, hoisting it onto his shoulder.

  “How do you know so much about dealing with mules and harness?” Nicopolis asked as she followed Sulla into the trees, picking her way carefully.

  “Anyone does who’s worked in the Port of Rome,” said Sulla over his unburdened shoulder. “Take it slowly, now! We’re not going far, and there’s no hurry.”

  Indeed, they had made good time. Since the month was early September, the twelve hours of daylight were still on the long side at sixty-five minutes each; it still wanted two hours before noon when Sulla and Nicopolis entered the woods.

  “This isn’t virgin forest,” he said, “which is probably why no one logs in it. In the old days this land was given over to wheat, but after the grain started coming from Sicily and Sardinia and Africa Province, the farmers moved into Rome and left the trees to grow back, for it’s poor soil.”

  “You’re amazing, Lucius Cornelius,” she said, trying to keep up with Sulla’s long, easy strides. “How is it that you know so many things about the world?’’

  “It’s my luck. What I hear or read, I remember.”

  They emerged then into an enchanting clearing, grassy and filled with late-summer flowers—pink and white cosmos, great blooming jungles of pink and white rambling roses, and lupines in tall spikes, pink and white. Through the clearing flowed a stream in full spate from the rain, its bed filled with jagged rocks which divided its waters into deep still pools and foaming cascades; the sun glittered and flashed off its surface, amid dragonflies and little birds.

  “Oh, how beautiful!” cried Nicopolis.

  “I found it last year when I went away for those few months,” he said, putting the hamper down in a patch of shade. “My gig cast a wheel right where that track runs into the forest, and I had to put Metrobius up on one of the mules and send him to Tibur for help. While I waited, I explored.”

  It gave Nicopolis no satisfaction to know that the despised and feared Metrobius had undoubtedly been shown this special place first, but she said nothing, simply flopped down in the grass and watched Sulla take a big skin of wine from the interior of the hamper. He immersed the wineskin in the stream where a natural fence of rocks anchored it, then took off his tunic and removed his open boots, all he wore.

  Sulla’s lighthearted mood still lay inside his bones, as warming as the sun upon his skin; he stretched, smiling, and looked about the glade with an affection which had nothing to do with Metrobius or Nicopolis. Simply, his pleasure came from a divorcement from the predicaments and frustrations which so hedged his normal life around, a place where he could tell himself that time did not move, politics did not exist, people were classless, and money an invention for the future. His moments of pure happiness were so few and dispersed so thinly along the route march of his life that he remembered every single one of them with piercing clarity—the day when the jumble of squiggles on a piece of paper suddenly turned into understandable thoughts, the hour in which an enormously kind and thoughtful man had shown him how perfect the act of love could be, the stunning emancipation of his father’s death, and the realization that this clearing in a forest was the first piece of land he had ever been able to call his own, in that it belonged to no one who cared enough to visit it except for him. And that was all. The sum total. None was founded in an appreciation of beauty, or even of the process of living; they represented the acquisition of literacy, erotic pleasure, freedom from authority, and property. For those were the things Sulla prized, the things Sulla wanted.

  Fascinated, Nicopolis watched him without even beginning to understand the source of his happiness, marveling at the absolute whiteness of his body in full sun—a sight she had never seen before—and the fiery gold of head and chest and groin. All far too much to resist; she doffed her own light robe and the shift she wore beneath it, its long back tail caught between her legs and pinned in front, until she too was naked and could relish the kiss of the sun.

  They waded into one of the deep pools, gasping with the cold, stayed there long enough to warm up while Sulla played with her erect nipples and her beautiful breasts, then clambered out upon the thick soft grass and made love while they dried off. After which they ate their lunch, breads and cheeses and hard-boiled eggs and chicken wings, washed down with the chilly wine. She made a wreath of flowers for Sulla’s hair, then made another for her own, and rolled over three times from the sheer voluptuous gratification of being alive.

  “Oh, this is wonderful!” she sighed. “Clitumna doesn’t know what she’s missing.”

  “Clitumna never knows what she’s missing,” said Sulla.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Nicopolis idly, the mischief-bee back buzzing inside her mind. “She’s missing Sticky Stichy.” And she began to hum the ditty about murder until she caught the flickering end of a glance from him that told her he was becoming angry. She didn’t honestly believe Sulla had contrived at Stichus’s death, but when she implied for the first time that Sulla had, she picked up interesting echoes of alarm from Sulla, and so kept it up from sheer idle curiosity.

  Time to stop it. Leaping to her feet, she held out her hands to Sulla, still lying full length. “Come on, lazybones, I want to walk under the trees and cool off,” she said.

  He rose obediently, took her hand, and strolled with her under the eaves of the forest, where no undergrowth marred the carpet of sodden leaves, warm after the day’s perfect portion of sun. Being barefoot was a treat.

  And there they were! A miniature army of the most exquisite mushrooms Nicopolis had ever seen, every last one unmarked by insect hole or animal paw, purest white, fat and fleshy of canopy yet nicely slender of stalk, and giving off a heady aroma of earth.

  “Oh, goody!” she cried, dropping to her knees.

  Sulla grimaced. “Come on,” he said.

  “No, don’t be mean just because you dislike mushrooms! Please, Lucius Cornelius, please! Go back to the hamper and find me a cloth—I’m going to take some of these home for my supper,” said Nicopolis, voice determined.

  “They mightn’t be good ones,” he said, not moving.

  “Nonsense, of course they’re good! Look! There’s no membrane covering up the gills, no spots, no red color. They smell superb too. And this isn’t an oak, is it?” She looked up at the tree in the base of which the mushrooms were growing.

  Sulla eyed is* deeply scalloped leaves and experienced a vision of the inevitability of fate, the pointing finger of his lucky goddess. “No, it�
�s not an oak,” he said.

  “Then please! Please?” she wheedled.

  He sighed. “All right, have it your own way.”

  A whole miniature army of mushrooms perished as Nicopolis selected her treasure trove, then wrapped it in the napkin Sulla had brought her and carefully laid it in the bottom of the hamper, where it would be protected from the heat as they drove home.

  “I don’t know why you and Clitumna don’t like mushrooms,” she said after they were ensconced in the gig again, and the mules were trotting eagerly in the direction of their stables.

  “I never have liked them,” said Sulla, not interested.

  “All the more for me,” she said, and giggled.

  “What’s so special about this lot, anyway?” Sulla asked.

  “At the moment you can buy mushrooms by the ton in the markets, and dirt-cheap too.”

  “These are mine,” she tried to explain. “I found them, I saw how absolutely perfect they were, I picked them. The ones in the markets are any old how—full of grubs, holes, spiders, the gods know what. Mine will taste much better, I promise you.”

  They did taste better. When Nicopolis brought them into the kitchen the cook handled them suspiciously, but had to admit he couldn’t fault them with eyes or nose.

  “Fry them lightly in a little oil,” said Nicopolis.

  As it happened, the vegetable slave had brought home a huge basket of mushrooms from the markets that morning, so cheap that the entire staff was allowed to gorge on them, and had been doing so all day. Therefore no one was tempted to steal a few of the new arrivals; the cook was able to fry all of them just long enough to soften them and heat them through, then tossed them in a dish with a little freshly ground pepper and a squeeze of onion juice, and sent them to the dining room for Nicopolis. Who ate of them ravenously, her appetite sharpened by the day out—and by Clitumna’s monumental fit of the sulks. For, of course, the moment it was too late to send a servant to catch them, Clitumna had regretted her decision not to go on the famous picnic. Subjected to a paean on the subject throughout dinner, she reacted badly, and ended her day by announcing that she would sleep alone.

  It was eighteen hours later before Nicopolis experienced a pain in her belly. She became nauseated and was a little sick, but had no diarrhoea, and admitted the pain was bearable, she’d known worse. Then she urinated a small volume of fluid red with blood, and panicked.

  Doctors were summoned at once; the household ran about distractedly; Clitumna sent servants out to look for Sulla, who had gone out early in the day without leaving any word of his destination.

  When Nicopolis’s heart rate went up and her blood pressure fell, the doctors looked grave. She had a convulsion, her respiration grew slow and shallow, her heart began to fibrillate, and she passed inexorably into coma. As it happened, no one even thought of mushrooms.

  “Kidney failure,” said Athenodorus of Sicily, now the most successful medical practitioner on the Palatine.

  Everyone else concurred.

  And about the time that Sulla came rushing home, Nicopolis died from a massive internal haemorrhage—the victim, said the doctors, of a complete systemic collapse.

  “We should perform an autopsy,” said Athenodorus.

  “I agree,” said Sulla, who didn’t mention mushrooms.

  “Is it catching?” asked Clitumna pathetically, looking old and ill and desperately alone.

  Everyone said no.

  *

  The autopsy confirmed the diagnosis of renal and hepatic failure: kidneys and liver were swollen, congested, and full of haemorrhages. The envelope around Nicopolis’s heart had bled, as had the linings of her stomach, her small intestine, and her colon. The innocent-looking mushroom called The Destroyer had done its subtle work well.

  Sulla organized the funeral (Clitumna was too prostrated) and walked in the procession as chief mourner, ahead of the stars of the Roman comedic and mimetic theaters; their presence assured a good attendance, which would have pleased Nicopolis.

  And when Sulla returned to Clitumna’s house afterward, he found Gaius Julius Caesar waiting for him. Throwing off his dark mourning toga, Sulla joined Clitumna and her guest-in her sitting room. On few occasions had he set eyes on Gaius Julius Caesar, and knew the senator not at all; that the senator would visit Clitumna because of the untimely death of a Greek strumpet struck Sulla as very odd, so he was on his guard and punctiliously correct as he was introduced.

  “Gaius Julius,” he said, bowing.

  “Lucius Cornelius,” said Caesar, bowing also.

  They did not shake hands, but when Sulla sat down, Caesar resumed his own seat with apparent tranquillity. He turned to the weeping Clitumna and spoke kindly.

  “My dear, why stay?” he asked. “Marcia is waiting next door for you. Have your steward take you to her. Women stand in need of women’s company in times of grief.”

  Without a word Clitumna rose and tottered to the door, while the visitor reached into his dark toga and produced a small roll of paper, which he then laid on the table.

  “Lucius Cornelius, your friend Nicopolis had me draw up her will and lodge it with the Vestals a long time ago. The lady Clitumna is aware of its contents, which is why she did not need to stay to hear me read it.”

  “Yes?” asked Sulla, at a loss. He could rind nothing further to say, and so sat dumbly, gazing at Caesar rather blankly.

  Caesar moved to the crux of the matter. “Lucius Cornelius, the lady Nicopolis made you her sole heir.”

  Sulla’s expression remained blank. “She did?”

  “She did.”

  “Well, I suppose if I’d thought about it, I would have known she’d be bound to do that,” said Sulla, recovering. “Not that it matters. Everything she had, she spent.”

  Caesar looked at him keenly. “She didn’t, you know. The lady Nicopolis was quite wealthy.”

  “Rubbish!” said Sulla.

  “Truly, Lucius Cornelius, she was quite wealthy. She owned no property, but she was the widow of a military tribune who did extremely well out of booty. What he left her, she invested. As of this morning, her estate is in excess of two hundred thousand denarii,” said Caesar.

  There could be no mistaking the genuineness of Sulla’s shock. Whatever Caesar might have thought of him until that moment, he knew he was now looking at a man who possessed no inkling of this information; Sulla sat stupefied.

  Then he sank back in his chair, put shaking hands up to his face, shuddered, and gasped. “So much! Nicopolis?”

  “So much. Two hundred thousand denarii. Or eight hundred thousand sesterces, if you prefer. A knight’s portion.”

  Down came Sulla’s hands. “Oh, Nicopolis!” he said.

  Caesar got to his feet, extending his hand. Sulla took it dazedly.

  “No, Lucius Cornelius, don’t get up,” said Caesar warmly. “My dear fellow, I cannot tell you how delighted I am for you. I know it’s difficult to salve your grief at this early stage, but I would like you to know that I’ve often wished with all my heart that one day you would better your fortune—and your luck. In the morning I’ll commence probate. You had better meet me in the Forum at the second hour. By the shrine of Vesta. For now, I bid you good day.”

  After Caesar had gone, Sulla sat without moving for a long time. The house was as silent as Nicopolis’s grave; Clitumna must have stayed next door with Marcia, and the servants were creeping about.

  Perhaps as many as six hours went by before he finally got up, stiff and sore, and stretched a little. The blood began to flow, his heart to fill with fire.

  “Lucius Cornelius, you are on your way at last,” he said, and began to laugh.

  Though it started very softly, his laughter swelled and rolled into a shriek, a roar, a howl of mirth; the servants, listening terrified, debated among themselves as to which one was going to venture into Clitumna’s sitting room. But before they could reach a decision, Sulla stopped laughing.

  *

  Clitu
mna aged almost overnight. Though her years numbered only fifty, the death of her nephew had kicked the ageing process into a gallop; now the death of her dearest friend—and her lover—compounded her devastation. Not even Sulla had the power to jolly her out of her megrims. Not mime nor farce could lure her out of the house, nor could her regular visitors Scylax and Marsyas provoke a smile. What appalled her was the shrinking world of her intimates as well as her own encroaching dotage; if Sulla should abandon her—for his inheritance from Nicopolis had freed him from economic dependence upon her—she would be completely alone. A prospect she dreaded.

  Soon after Nicopolis died, she sent for Gaius Julius Caesar. “One cannot leave anything to the dead,” she said to him, “and so I must alter my will yet again.”

  The will was altered forthwith, and taken back to repose in the Vestal pigeonholes.

  Still she moped. Her tears dropped like rain, her once restless hands were folded in her lap like two unbaked leaves of pastry waiting for the cook to fill them. Everyone worried; everyone understood there was nothing to be done save wait for time to heal. If there was time.

  For Sulla it was time.

  Julilla’s latest missive said:

  I love you, even though the months and now the years have shown me how little my love is returned, how little my fate matters to you. Last June I turned eighteen, by rights I should be married, but I have managed to postpone that evil necessity by making myself ill. I must marry you, you and no one but you, my most beloved, my dearest Lucius Cornelius. And so my father hesitates, unable to present me to anyone as a suitable or desirable bride, and I shall keep it that way until you come to me and say that you will marry me. Once you said I was a baby, I would grow out of my immature love for you, but surely so long after— it is almost two years—I have proven my worth, I have proven that my love for you is as constant as the return of the sun from the south each spring. She is gone, your thin Greek lady I hated with every breath I drew, and cursed, and wished dead dead dead. You see how powerful I am, Lucius Cornelius? Why then do you not understand that you cannot escape me? No heart can be as full of love as mine and not generate reciprocation. You do love me, I know you love me. Give in, Lucius Cornelius, give in. Come and see me, kneel down beside my bed of pain and sorrow, let me draw down your head onto my breast, and offer me your kiss. Don’t sentence me to die! Choose to let me live. Choose to marry me.