2. The Grass Crown

by Colleen McCullough

  "That wretched child!" Aurelia said to Lucius Cornelius Sulla when he called in late September to see her. "The family clubbed together to find the money to hire him a magnificent pedagogue, and what happens? The pedagogue has fallen for his charm!" "Huh," said Sulla, who hadn't called to hear a litany even of complaint about any of Aurelia's offspring. Children bored him, no matter how bright and charming; that his own did not bore him was a source of mystery. No, he had called to tell Aurelia he was going away. "So you're deserting me too," she said, offering him grapes from her courtyard garden. "Very soon, I'm afraid. Titus Didius wants to ship his troops to Spain by sea, and early winter's the best time of year. However, I'm going ahead by land to prepare for their arrival." "Tired of Rome?" "Wouldn't you be, in my shoes?" "Oh, yes." He moved restlessly, clenched his fists in frustration. "I am never going to get there, Aurelia!" But that only provoked a laugh. "Pooh! You've got October Horse written all over you, Lucius Cornelius. One day it will come, you wait and see." "Not entirely, I hope," he said, laughing too. "I'd like to keep my head on my shoulders which is more than the poor October Horse ever does! Why is that, I wonder? The trouble with all our rituals is that they're so old we don't even understand the language in which we rattle off the prayers, let alone know why we harness war-horses in pairs to chariots, and race them, and then sacrifice the right-hand beast of the winning team. As for fighting over its head !" So bright was the light that his pupils had contracted to pinpoints and gave him the look of a blinded seer; the eyes he turned on her were filled with a seer's pain not a pain of past or present, but doomed by knowledge of the future. And he cried out, "Aurelia, Aurelia! Why is it that I never manage to be happy?" Her heart squeezed itself up, she pressed her nails into her palms. "I don't know, Lucius Cornelius." "Nor do I." How horrible to offer him good sense, yet what else could she do? "I think you need to be busy." He answered her dryly. "Oh, definitely! When I'm busy, I have no time to think." "So I find it," she said huskily, and then said, "There ought to be more to life than that." They were sitting in the reception room alongside the low wall of the courtyard garden, one on either side of a table, the grapes, all swollen and purple, in a dish between them. When she finished speaking she continued to look at him, though he had turned his gaze away from her. How attractive he is! she thought, feeling a sudden stab of a private misery she normally kept completely below conscious level. He has a mouth like my husband's, and beautiful it is. Beautiful. Beautiful. .. Up came Sulla's eyes, straight into hers; Aurelia blushed scarlet. His face changed, exactly how, hard to define he just seemed to become more of himself. Out went his hand to her, a sudden and bewitching smile lighting him. "Aurelia " She put her own hand into his, caught her breath, felt dizzy. "What, Lucius Cornelius?" she managed to ask. "Have an affair with me!" Her mouth was dry, she felt she must swallow or lose consciousness, yet could not; and his fingers around hers were like the last threads of a slipping life, she could not leave them go and survive. How he got himself around the table she never afterward understood, only looked up at his face so close to hers, the sheen on his lips, the layers in his eyes flaked as in the depths of polished marble. Fascinated, she watched a muscle in his right arm move beneath its sheath of skin, and found herself vibrating rather than trembling, as weak, as lost. .. She closed her eyes and waited, and then when she felt his mouth touch hers, she kissed him as if starved of love for some long eternity, awash with more emotions than she had ever known existed, stunned, terrified, exalted, burned to a cinder. One moment more and the whole room lay between them, Aurelia flat against a brightly painted wall as if trying to lose a dimension, Sulla by the table drawing in great breaths, with the sun seeding fire through his hair. "I can't!" she said, a quiet scream. "Then may you never know another moment's peace!" Determined even in the midst of this towering rage that he would do nothing she could find laughable or farcical, he dealt magnificently with his toga, abandoned on the floor; then, every footstep telling her he would never come back, he walked out of that place as if he were the victor of the field.

  But there could be no satisfaction for himself in being the victor of the field he was too furious at his defeat. Home Sulla walked with such a storm wrapped round him that whole crowds leaped out of his way. How dared she! How dared she sit there with the hunger naked in her eyes, lead him on with a kiss such a kiss! then tell him she couldn't. As if she hadn't wanted it more than he. He ought to kill her, break her slender neck, see her face puff up from some poison, watch those purple eyes bulge out as his fingers tightened about her throat. Kill her, kill her, kill her, kill her, said the heart he could hear in his ears, said the blood distending the veins of forehead and scalp. Kill her, kill her, kill her! And no less a part of that gigantic fury was the knowledge that he couldn't kill her any more than he had been able to kill Julilla, kill Aelia, kill Dalmatica. Why? What did these women have that women like Clitumna and Nicopolis did not? At sight of him when he erupted into the atrium his servants scattered, his wife retreated voiceless to her own room, and his house shrank in upon itself, so huge was its silence. In his study he went straight to the little wooden temple which held the wax mask of his ancestor the flamen Dialis, and wrenched open the drawer hidden in its perfect flight of steps. The first object his groping fingers fastened around was a tiny bottle, and there it lay upon his palm, its clear contents lapping sluggishly inside its walls of greenish glass. He looked, and he looked. The time he spent looking down at what he held in his hand had no measure, nor could his mind now dredge up one single thought; all he owned was rage. Or was it pain? Or was it grief? Or was it just a monumental loneliness? From fire he fell down through warmth to coolness, and finally to ice. Only then could he face this frightful disability, the fact that he, so enamored of murder as a solace as well as a necessity, could not physically perform the deed upon a woman of his own class. With Julilla as with Aelia, he had at least found comfort in witnessing their manifest misery because of him, and with Julilla he had known the satisfaction of causing her death; for there could be no doubt that had she not seen his reunion with Metrobius, she would have continued to guzzle her wine and fix her great hollow yellow eyes upon him mournfully in silent, eternal reproach. With Aurelia, however, he could count on no reaction lasting longer than his presence in her house; as soon as he had gone out her front door, no doubt, she had picked up the pieces of a momentary lapse and buried herself in her work. By tomorrow, she would forget him completely. That was Aurelia. May she rot! May she be chewed up by worms! The malignant sow! In the midst of these futile, age-old curses, he caught himself up and grinned a twisted travesty of amusement. No comfort there. Ridiculous, ludicrous. The gods took no note of human frustrations or desires, and he was not of that kind who could in some awful, mysterious way transfer his destructive thoughts into a death wish which bore fruit. Aurelia still lived within him, he needed to banish her before he went to Spain if he was to bend all his energies to the advancement of his career. He needed a something to replace the ecstasy he would have known in breaching the walls of Aurelia's citadel. The fact that until he surprised the look on her face he had harbored no wish to seduce her was beside the point the urge had been so powerful, so all-pervasive that he could not shake himself free of it. Rome, of course. Once he got to Spain it would all go away. If he could find some kind of satisfaction now. In the field he never suffered these dreadful frustrations, perhaps because he was too busy, perhaps because death lay all around him, perhaps because he could tell himself he was moving upward. But in Rome and he had been in Rome now for almost three years he came eventually to a degree of thwarted boredom which in the past had only dissipated after literal or metaphorical murder. He fell, ice-cold, into a reverie; faces came and went, of victims and of those he wished were victims. Julilla. Aelia. Dalmatica. Lucius Gavius Stichus. Clitumna. Nicopolis. Catulus Caesar how nice to wipe that haughty camel's look away forever! Scaurus. Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle. Piggle-wiggle ... Slowly Sulla got up, slowly closed the secr
et drawer. But kept the little bottle in his hand. The water clock said it was the middle of the day. Six hours gone, six hours to go. Drip drip, drip drip. Time enough and more to visit Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle.