2. The Grass Crown

by Colleen McCullough

  Rage and frustration at the conduct of Cornelia Sulla vanished, home Sulla went with footsteps as light as a child's, face a picture of happiness. Happiness wiped away in the thinnest sliver of time when he opened his own front door and discovered, instead of the hushed, dimly lit peace of sleeping tenants, a blaze of light from every lamp, a huddle of strange young men, a steward wiping tears from his streaming eyes. "What is it?" Sulla asked, gasping. "Your son, Lucius Cornelius!" cried the steward. Sulla waited to hear no more, but ran to the room off the peristyle-garden where Aelia had put the boy to get over his cold. She was standing outside its door, wrapped in a shawl. "What is it?" Sulla asked again, grabbing at her. "Young Sulla is very ill," she whispered. "I called the doctors two hours ago." Pushing the doctors aside, Sulla appeared beside his son's bed looking benevolent and relaxed. "What is this, Young Sulla, giving everybody such a fright?" "Father!" Young Sulla cried, smiling. "What's the matter?" "So cold, Father! Do you mind if I call you tata in front of strangers?" "Of course not." "The pain, it's terrible!" "Whereabouts, my son?" "Behind my breast-bone, tata. So cold!" He breathed shallowly, loudly, with obvious distress; to Sulla it seemed a parody of Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle's death scene, which perhaps was why Sulla could not believe in this as a death scene. Yet Young Sulla looked as if he were dying. Impossible! "Don't talk, my son. Can you lie down?" This, because the doctors had propped him into a sitting position. "Can't breathe, lying down." The eyes, ringed with what looked like black bruises, looked up at him piteously. "Tata, please don't go away, will you?" "I'm here, Lucius. I won't go away for a moment." But as soon as possible Sulla did draw Apollodorus Siculus out of earshot to ask him what the matter was. "An inflammation of the lungs, Lucius Cornelius, difficult to deal with at any time, but more difficult in your son's case." "Why more difficult?" "The heart is involved, I fear. We do not quite know what is the significance of the heart, though I believe that it assists the liver. Young Lucius Cornelius's lungs are swollen, and have transmitted some of their fluids to the envelope wrapping up the heart. It is being squashed." Apollodorus Siculus looked frightened; the price he paid for his fame was paid on occasions like this, when he had to tell some august Roman that the patient was beyond the skills of any physician. "The prognosis is grave, Lucius Cornelius. I fear there is nothing I or any other doctor can do." Sulla took it well outwardly, and had besides a reasonable streak which told him the physician was completely sincere that, if he could, he would cure. A good physician, though most were quacks look at the way he had investigated the death of Piggle-wiggle. But every body was subject to storms of such magnitude the doctors were rendered helpless, despite their lancets, their clysters, their poultices, their potions, their magical herbs. It was luck. And Sulla saw now that his beloved son did not have luck. The goddess Fortune did not care for him. Back he went to the bed, pushed the heaped pillows aside and took their place, holding his son within his arms. "Oh, tata, that does feel better! Don't leave me!" "I won't budge, my son. I love you more than the world." For many hours he sat holding his lad up, his cheek on the dulled wet hair, listening to the labored breathing, the staccato gasps which were evidence of that remorseless pain. The boy could not be persuaded to cough anymore, the agony of it was too much to bear, nor could he be persuaded to drink, his lips encrusted with fever sores, his tongue furred and dark. Occasionally he spoke, always to his father, in a voice growing gradually weaker, more mumbling, the words he said ever less lucid, less sensible, until he wandered without logic or reason in a world too strange to comprehend. Thirty hours later he died in his father's numbed arms. Not once had Sulla moved, except at the boy's request; he had not eaten or drunk, had not relieved bladder or bowels, yet knew no discomfort whatsoever, so important was it that he be there for his son. It might have been a comfort for the father had Young Sulla acknowledged him at the moment of death, but Young Sulla had moved far from the room where he lay, the arms in which he lay, and died unknowing. Everyone feared Lucius Cornelius Sulla. So it was in breathless fear that four physicians loosened Sulla's arms from about his breathless son, helped Sulla to his feet and held him on them, laid the boy out on his bed. But Sulla said or did nothing to inspire this fear; he behaved like the sanest, most admirable man. When he regained the use of his spasmed muscles, he helped them wash the boy and clothe him in the purple-bordered toga of childhood; in December of this year, on the feast of Juventas, he would have become a man. To allow weeping slaves to change the bed, he picked up his son's limp grey form and held it in his arms, then laid him down on the fresh clean sheets, tucked his arms along his sides, put the coins on his eyelids to keep them closed, and slipped the coin into his mouth to pay Charon the price of that last lonely voyage. Nor had Aelia moved from the doorway during all those terrible hours; now Sulla took her by the shoulders and guided her to a chair beside the bed, sat her down so she could look at the boy she had reared from his nursery days, and thought of as her own. Cornelia Sulla was there, face frightful from punishment; and Julia, and Gaius Marius, and Aurelia. Sulla greeted them like a sane man, accepted their tearful condolences, even smiled a little, and answered their hesitant questions in a firm clear voice. "I must bathe and change," he said then. "It's dawn of the day I stand my trial in the treason court. Though my son's death would serve as a legitimate excuse, I will not give Censorinus the satisfaction. Gaius Marius, will you accompany me as soon as I'm ready to go?" "Gladly, Lucius Cornelius," said Marius gruffly, wiping the tears from his eyes. He had never admired Sulla more. But first Sulla went to his house's modest latrine, and found no one, slave or free, inside it. His bowels loosened at last, he sat alone in that place, with its four shaped seats in the marble bench, listening to the deep sound of running water below, his hands fiddling with the disordered folds of his toga, which he had not thought to remove before settling to that last vigil with his son. His fingers encountered an object, wondering; he drew it forth to look at it in the growing light, only recognizing it from some huge distance, as if it belonged to another life. The emerald quizzing-glass of Censorinus! When he was done and had tidied himself, he turned to face the marble bench, and dropped the priceless thing down into the void. The water ran too loudly to hear its splash. As he appeared in the atrium to join Gaius Marius, walk down to the Forum Romanum, some strange agency had given him back every atom of the beauty of his youth, so that he shone, and everyone who saw him gasped. He and Gaius Marius trod in silence all the way to the Pool of Curtius, where several hundred knights had gathered to offer themselves for jury duty, and the court officials were readying the jars to draw the lots; eighty-one would be chosen, but fifteen would be removed at the request of the prosecution, and fifteen at the request of the defense, leaving fifty-one twenty-six knights, and twenty-five senators. That extra knight was the price the Senate had paid to put the courts under senatorial presidency. Time wore on. The jurors were chosen. And when Censorinus had not appeared, the defense, led by Crassus Orator and Scaevola, was permitted to remove its fifteen jurors. Still Censorinus did not come. At noon, the entire court restless, and now in possession of the knowledge that the defendant had come straight from his only son's deathbed, the President sent a messenger to Censorinus's house to find out where he was. Long moments later, the clerk returned with the news that Censorinus had packed up his portable belongings the day before and left for an unknown destination abroad. "This court is dismissed," said the President. "Lucius Cornelius, you have our profound apologies as well as our condolences." "I'll walk with you, Lucius Cornelius," said Marius. "An odd situation, this! What happened to him?" "Thank you, Gaius Marius, I would prefer to be alone," said Sulla calmly. "As for Censorinus, I imagine he's gone to seek asylum with King Mithridates." There came a hideous grin. "I had a little word with him, you see." From the Forum Romanum, Sulla walked swiftly in the direction of the Esquiline Gate. Almost completely covering the Campus Esquilinus outside the Servian Walls lay Rome's necropolis, a veritable city of tombs some humble, some splendid
, most in between housing the ashes of Rome's inhabitants, citizens and non-citizens, slaves and free, native and foreign. On the eastern side of a great crossroads some hundreds of paces from the Servian Walls stood the temple of Venus Libitina, she who ruled the extinction of the life force. Surrounded by a large grove of cypresses, it was a beautiful building, painted a rich green with purple columns, their Ionic capitals picked out in gold and red, and a yellow roof to its portico. The many steps were paved with a deep pink terrazzo, and the pediment portrayed the gods and goddesses of the Underworld in vivid colors; atop the peak of the temple roof was a wonderful gilded statue of Venus Libitina herself, riding in a car drawn by mice, harbingers of death. Here amid the cypress grove the Guild of Undertakers set up their stalls and touted for business, not a doleful or sad or hushed activity. Prospective customers were grabbed at, harangued, coaxed, badgered, cajoled, prodded and pushed and pulled, for undertaking was a business like any other, and this was the marketplace of the servants of death. Sulla passed like a ghost among the booths, his uncanny knack of repelling people keeping even the most importunate at bay until he came to the firm which buried the Cornelii, and made his arrangements. The actors would be sent to his house for instructions on the following day, and all would be splendidly readied for the funeral, to be held on the third day; a Cornelius, Young Sulla would be inhumed rather than cremated, as was the family tradition. Sulla paid in full with a promissory note for twenty silver talents at his bank, the price of a funeral Rome would talk about for days, and did not count the cost, he who normally squeezed every sestertius so carefully, so ungenerously. At home again, he sent Aelia and Cornelia Sulla out of the room where Young Sulla lay and sat in Aelia's chair, staring at his devastated son. He didn't know what he felt, how he felt. The grief, the loss, the finality of it all sat within him like a huge lead boulder; to carry the burden was as much as he could manage, he had nothing left over with which to explore his feelings. There before him lay the ruin of his house, there lay all that was left of his dearest friend, the companion of his old age, the heir to his name, his fortune, his reputation, his public career. Vanished in the space of thirty hours, a decision of no god, not even a whim of fate. The cold had worsened, the lungs had become inflamed, and the heart squeezed dry of animation. The story of a thousand illnesses. No one's fault, no one's design. An accident. For the boy, who could know nothing, feel nothing, it was simply the end of life, suffered to conclusion. For those left behind, knowing all, feeling all, it was the prelude to an emptiness in the midst of life that would not cease until life was over. His son was dead. His friend was gone forever. When Aelia came back two hours later he went to his study, and sat to write a note to Metrobius.