The First Man in Rome

  “No,” said Lusius, the color fading from his cheeks.

  “I think I am, really,” said Sulla, smiling to show his long teeth unpleasantly. “You’re attracted to handsome young men, not to pretty young women. I can’t accuse you of overt effeminacy, but if you go on fluttering your eyelashes at the likes of Gaius Julius — who happens to be your uncle’s brother-in-law, as indeed am I — you’ll find yourself in boiling water up to the neck. Preferring one’s own sex is not considered a Roman virtue. On the contrary, it is considered — especially in the legions! — an undesirable vice. If it wasn’t, perhaps the women of the towns near which we camp wouldn’t make so much money, nor the women of the enemies we conquer find rape their first taste of our Roman swords. But you must know some of this, at least!”

  Lusius writhed, torn between a feeling of inexplicable inferiority and a burning sense of injustice. “Times are changing,” he protested. “It isn’t the social solecism it was!”

  “You mistake the times, Gaius Lusius, probably because you want them to change, and have been associating with a group of your peers who feel the same way. So you gather together and you compare notes, seizing upon any remark to support your contention. I can assure you,” Sulla said very seriously, “that the more you go about the world into which you were born, the more you will come to see that you are deluding yourself. And nowhere is there less forgiveness for preferring your own sex than in Gaius Marius’s army. And no one will crack down on you harder than Gaius Marius if he learns of your secret.”

  Almost weeping, Lusius wrung his hands together in futile anguish. “I’ll go mad!” he cried.

  “No, you won’t. You’ll discipline yourself, you’ll be extremely careful in whatever overtures you make, and as soon as you can, you’ll learn the signals that operate here between men of your own persuasion,” said Sulla. “I can’t tell you the signals because I don’t indulge in the vice myself. If you’re ambitious to succeed in public life, Gaius Lusius, I strongly advise you not to indulge in the vice. But if—you are young, after all—you find you cannot restrain your appetites, make very sure you pick on the right man.” And with a kinder smile, Sulla turned on his heel and walked away.

  For a while he simply strolled about aimlessly, hands behind his back, scarcely noticing the orderly activity all around him. The legions had been instructed to build a temporary camp, in spite of the fact that there wasn’t an enemy force inside the province; simply, no Roman army slept unprotected. The permanent hilltop camp was already being tackled by the surveyors and engineers, and those troops not detailed to construct the temporary camp were put onto the first stages of fortifying the hill. This consisted in procuring timber for beams, posts, buildings. And the lower Rhodanus Valley possessed few forests, for it had been populous now for some centuries, ever since the Greeks founded Massilia, and Greek—then Roman—influence spread inland.

  The army lay to the north of the vast salt marshes which formed the Rhodanus delta and spread both west and east of it; it was typical of Marius that he had chosen unfilled ground whereon to build his camps, both temporary and permanent.

  “There’s no point in antagonizing one’s potential allies,” he said. “Besides which, with fifty thousand extra mouths in the area to feed, they’re going to need every inch of arable land they’ve got.”

  Marius’s grain and food procurators were already riding out to conclude contracts with farmers, and some of the troops were building granaries atop the hill to hold sufficient grain to feed fifty thousand men through the twelve months between one harvest and the next. The heavy baggage contained all manner of items Marius’s sources of information had said would either be unobtainable in Gaul-across-the-Alps, or would be scarce—pitch, massive beams, block-and-tackle, tools, cranes, treadmills, lime, and quantities of precious iron bolts and nails. At Populonia and Pisae, the two ports which received the rough-smelted bloom-iron “sows” from the isle of Ilva, the praefectus fabrum had purchased every sow available and carted them along too in case the engineers had to make steel; in the heavy baggage were anvils, crucibles, hammers, fire bricks, all the tools necessary. Already a group of soldiers were fetching timber to make a large cache of charcoal, for without charcoal it was impossible to get a furnace hot enough to melt iron, let alone steel it.

  And by the time that he turned back toward the general’s command tent, he had decided that the time had come; for Sulla had an answer to boredom already thoroughly thought out, an answer which would give him all the drama he could ask for. The idea had germinated while he was still in Rome, and grown busily all the way along the coast, and now could be permitted to flower. Yes, time to see Gaius Marius.

  The general was alone, writing industriously.

  “Gaius Marius, I wonder if you have an hour to spare? I would like your company on a walk,” Sulla said, holding open the flap between the tent and the hide awning under which the duty officer sat. An inquisitive beam of light had stolen in behind him, and so he stood surrounded by an aura of liquid gold, his bare head and shoulders alive with the fire of his curling hair.

  Looking up, Marius eyed this vision with disfavor. “You need a haircut,” he said curtly. “Another couple of inches and you’ll look like a dancing girl!”

  “How extraordinary!” said Sulla, not moving.

  “I’d call it slipshod,” said Marius.

  “No, what’s extraordinary is that you haven’t noticed for months, and right at this moment, when it’s in the forefront of my mind, you suddenly do notice. You may not be able to read minds, Gaius Marius, but I think you are attuned to the minds of those you work with.”

  “You sound like a dancing girl as well,” said Marius. “Why do you want company on a walk?”

  “Because I need to speak to you privately, Gaius Marius, somewhere that I can be sure neither the walls nor the windows have ears. A walk should provide us with such a place.”

  Down went the pen, the roll of paper was furled; Marius rose at once. “I’d much rather walk than write, Lucius Cornelius, so let’s go,” he said.

  They strode briskly through the camp, not talking, and unaware of the curious glances which followed them from parties of soldiers, centurions, cadets, and more soldiers; after three years of campaigning with Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the men of these legions had developed an inbuilt sense of sureness about their commanders that told them whenever there was something important in the offing. And today was such an occasion; every man sensed it.

  It was too late in the day to contemplate climbing the hill, so Marius and Sulla stopped where the wind blew their words away.

  “Now, what’s the matter?” asked Marius.

  “I started growing my hair long in Rome,” said Sulla.

  “Never noticed until now. I take it the hair has something to do with what you want to talk to me about?”

  “I’m turning myself into a Gaul,” Sulla announced.

  Marius looked alert. “Oho! Talk on, Lucius Cornelius.”

  “The most frustrating aspect of this campaign against the Germans is our abysmal lack of reliable intelligence about them,” Sulla said. “From the very beginning, when the Taurisci first sent us their request for aid and we discovered that the Germans were migrating, we’ve been handicapped by the fact that we know absolutely nothing about them. We don’t know who they are, where they come from, what gods they worship, why they migrated from their homelands in the first place, what sort of social organization they enjoy, how they are led. Most important of all, we don’t know why they keep defeating us and then turning away from Italy, when you wouldn’t have stopped Hannibal or Pyrrhus with a barricade of a million war elephants.”

  His eyes were looking ninety degrees away from Marius, and the last shafts of the sun shone through them from side to side, filling Marius with an uneasy awe; on rare occasions he was struck by a facet of Sulla normally hidden, the facet he thought of as Sulla’s inhumanity, and he didn’t use that word for any of its mo
re accepted connotations. Simply, Sulla could suddenly drop a veil and stand revealed as no man—but no god either—a different invention of the gods than a man. A quality reinforced at this moment, with the sun bound up inside his eyes as if it belonged there.

  “Go on,” said Marius.

  Sulla went on. “Before we left Rome, I bought myself two new slaves. They’ve traveled with me; they’re with me now. One is a Gaul of the Carnutes, the tribe which controls the whole Celtic religion. It’s a strange sort of worship— they believe trees are animate, in that they have spirits, or shades, or something of the kind. Difficult to relate to our own ideas. The other man is a German of the Cimbri, captured in Noricum at the time Carbo was defeated. I keep them isolated from each other. Neither man knows of the other’s existence.”

  “Haven’t you been able to find out about the Germans from your German slave?” asked Marius.

  “Not a thing. He pretends to have no knowledge of who they are or where they come from. My inquiries lead me to believe that this ignorance is a general characteristic in the few Germans we have managed to capture and enslave, though I very much doubt that any other Roman owner has actively tried to obtain information. That is now irrelevant. My purpose in buying my German was to obtain information, but when he proved recalcitrant—and there doesn’t seem to be much point in torturing someone who stands there like a gigantic ox—I had a better idea. Information, Gaius Marius, is usually secondhand. And for our purposes, secondhand isn’t good enough.”

  “True,” said Marius, who knew where Sulla was going now, but had no wish to hurry him.

  “So I began to think that if war with the Germans was not imminent, it behooved us to try to obtain information about them at first hand,” said Sulla. “Both my slaves have been in service to Romans for long enough to have learned Latin, though in the case of the German, it’s a very rudimentary sort of Latin. Interestingly, from my Carnutic Gaul I learned that once away from the Middle Sea and into Long-haired Gaul, the second language among the Gauls is Latin, not Greek! Oh, I don’t mean to imply that the Gauls walk round exchanging Latin quips, only that thanks to contacts between the settled tribes like the Aedui and ourselves— be it in the guise of soldiers or traders—there is an occasional Gaul who has a smattering of Latin, and has learned to read and write. Since their own languages are not written, when they read and write, they do so in Latin. Not in Greek. Fascinating, isn’t it? We’re so used to thinking of Greek as the lingua franca of the world that it’s quite exhilarating to find one part of the world preferring Latin!”

  “Not being either scholar or philosopher, Lucius Cornelius, I must confess to some lack of excitement. However,” said Marius, smiling faintly, “I am extremely interested in finding out about the Germans!”

  Sulla lifted his hands in mock surrender. “Point taken, Gaius Marius! Very well, then. For nearly five months I have been learning the language of the Carnutes of central Long-haired Gaul, and the language of the Cimbric Germans. My tutor in Carnute is far more enthusiastic about the project than my tutor in German—but then, he’s also a brighter specimen.” Sulla stopped to consider that statement, and found himself dissatisfied with it. “My impression that the German is duller may not necessarily be correct. He may be—since the shock of separation from his own kind is far greater than for the Gaul—merely living at a mental remoteness from his present plight. Or, given the luck of the grab bag and the fact that he was foolish enough to let himself be captured in a war his people won, he may just be a dull German.”

  “Lucius Cornelius, my patience is not inexhaustible,” said Marius, not snappishly, more in tones of resignation. “You are showing all the signs of a particularly peripatetic Peripatetic!’’

  “My apologies,” Sulla said with a grin, and turned now to look at Marius directly. The light died out of his eyes, and he seemed once again quite human.

  “With my hair and skin and eyes,” Sulla said crisply, “I can pass very easily for a Gaul. I intend to become a Gaul, and travel into areas where no Roman would dare go. Particularly, I intend to shadow the Germans on their way to Spain, which I gather means the people of the Cimbri for certain, and perhaps the other peoples. I now know enough Cimbric German to at least understand what they say, which is why I will concentrate upon the Cimbri.” He laughed. “My hair actually ought to be considerably longer than a dancing girl’s, but it will have to do for the moment. If I’m quizzed about its shortness, I shall say I had a disease of the scalp, and had to shave it all off. Luckily it grows very fast.”

  He fell silent. For some moments Marius didn’t speak, just put his foot up on a handy log and his elbow on his knee and his chin on his fist. The truth was that he couldn’t think of what to say. Here for months he had been worrying that he was going to lose Lucius Cornelius to the fleshpots of Rome because the campaign was going to be too boring, and all the time Lucius Cornelius was fastidiously working out a plan sure not to be boring. What a plan! What a man! Ulysses had been the first recorded spy, donning the guise of some Trojan nobody and sneaking inside the walls of Ilium to pick up every scrap of information he could—and one of the favorite debates a boy’s grammaticus concocted was whether or not Calchas had defected to the Achaeans because he was genuinely fed up with the Trojans, or because he wanted to spy for King Priam, or because he wanted to sow discord among the kings of Greece.

  Ulysses had had red hair too. Ulysses had been highborn too. And yet—Marius found it impossible to think of Sulla as some latter-day Ulysses. He was his own man, complete and rounded. Just as was his plan. There was no fear in him, so much was plain; he was approaching this extraordinary mission in a businesslike and—and—invulnerable way. In other words, he was approaching it like the Roman aristocrat he was. He harbored no doubts that he would succeed, because he knew he was better than other men.

  Down came the fist, the elbow, the foot. Marius drew a breath, and asked, “Do you honestly think you can do it, Lucius Cornelius? You’re such a Roman! I’m consumed with admiration for you, and it’s a brilliant, brilliant plan. But it will call for you to shed every last trace of the Roman, and I’m not sure any Roman can do that. Our culture is so enormously strong, it leaves ineradicable marks on us. You’ll have to live a lie.”

  One red-gold brow lifted; the corners of the beautiful mouth went down. “Oh, Gaius Marius, I have lived one kind of lie or another all my life!”

  “Even now?”

  “Even now.”

  They turned to commence walking back.

  “Do you intend to go on your own, Lucius Cornelius?” Marius asked. “Don’t you think it might be a good idea to have company? What if you need to send a message back to me urgently, but find you cannot leave yourself? And mightn’t it be a help to have a comrade to serve as your mirror, and you as his?”

  “I’ve thought of all that,” said Sulla, “and I would like to take Quintus Sertorius with me.”

  At first Marius looked delighted, then a frown gathered. “He’s too dark. He’d never pass for a Gaul, let alone a German.”

  “True. However, he could be a Greek with Celtiberian blood in him.” Sulla cleared his throat. “I gave him a slave when we left Rome, as a matter of fact. A Celtiberian of the tribe Illergetes. I didn’t tell Quintus Sertorius what was in the wind, but I did tell him to learn to speak Celtiberian.”

  Marius stared. “You’re well prepared. I approve.”

  “So I may have Quintus Sertorius?”

  “Oh, yes. Though I still think he’s too dark, and I wonder if that fact mightn’t undo you.”

  “No, it will be all right. Quintus Sertorius is extremely valuable to me, and his darkness will, I fancy, turn out to be an asset. You see, Quintus Sertorius has animal magic, and men with animal magic are held in great awe by all barbarian peoples. His darkness will contribute to his shaman-power.”

  “Animal magic? What exactly do you mean?”

  “Quintus Sertorius can summon wild creatures to him. I noticed it
in Africa, when he actually whistled up a pard-cat and fondled it. But I only began to work out a role for him on this mission when he made a pet out of the eagle chick he cured, yet didn’t kill its natural wish to be free and wild. So now it lives as it was meant to, yet it still remains his friend, and comes to visit him, and sits on his arm and kisses him. The soldiers reverence him. It is a great omen.”

  “I know,” said Marius. “The eagle is the symbol of the legions, and Quintus Sertorius has reinforced it.”

  They stood looking at the place where six silver eagles upon silver poles ornamented with crowns and phalerae medals and torcs were driven into the ground; a fire in a tripod burned before them, sentries stood to attention, and a togate priest with folds pulled up to cover his head threw incense on the coals in the tripod as he said the sundown prayers.

  “What exactly is the importance of this animal magic?” Marius asked.

  “The Gauls are highly superstitious about the spirits which dwell in all wild things, and so I gather are the Cimbric Germans. Quintus Sertorius will masquerade as a shaman from a Spanish tribe so remote even the tribes of the Pyrenees will not know much about him,” said Sulla.

  “When do you intend to set out?”

  “Very soon now. But I’d prefer it if you told Quintus Sertorius,” said Sulla. “He’ll want to come, but his loyalty to you is complete. So it’s better that you tell him.” He blew through his nostrils. “No one is to know. No one!”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Marius. “However, there are three slaves who know a little something, since they’ve been giving you language lessons. Do you want them sold and shipped overseas somewhere?”

  “Why go to so much trouble?” asked Sulla, surprised. “I intended to kill them.”

  “An excellent idea. But you’ll lose money on the deal.”