The First Man in Rome

  And then in Sextilis, after a wearying yet uncomplaining gestation, Hermana gave birth to twin boys, big and healthy and red-haired; Sulla called one Herman, and the other Cornel. He had racked his brains to think of a name which would in some way perpetuate his gens, Cornelius, yet wouldn’t sound too odd in the German tongue. “Cornel” was his solution.

  The babies were everything twin boys ought to be: so alike it was difficult to tell them apart, even for their mother and father; content to be together; more interested in thriving than crying. Twins were rare, and their birth to this strange outlander couple was considered an omen important enough to secure Sulla the thaneship of a whole group of small tribes. In consequence, he went to the grand council Boiorix called of all the Germans of all three peoples after the King of the Cimbri settled Atuatuci-Teutonic friction without bloodshed.

  For some time, of course, Sulla had known he would soon have to leave, but he put off his departure until after that grand council, aware that he worried over what should have been a very minor consideration—what would happen to Hermana and his sons once he was gone? The men of his tribe he might possibly have trusted, but the women were not to be trusted, and in any domestic tribal situation, the women would prevail. The moment he disappeared, Hermana would die under the clubs, even if her sons were allowed to survive.

  It was September, and time was of the essence. Yet Sulla made a decision which ran counter both to self-interest and Rome’s interest. Though he could ill afford the time, before he returned to Marius he would take Hermana back to her own people in Germania. That meant he had to tell her who and what he was. She was more fascinated than surprised; he saw her eyes turn to their sons with wonder in them, as if now she truly understood how important they were, these sons of a demigod. No grief appeared on her face when he told her he would have to leave her forever, but gratitude did when he told her he would first deliver her to the Marsi of Germania, in the hope that among her own settled people she would be protected and allowed to live.

  At the beginning of October they left the gargantuan enclave of Germans wagons, during the first hours of darkness, having chosen a site for their wagons and beasts from which their departure was less likely to attract notice. When day broke they were still wending their way between German wagons, but no one paid them any attention, and two days after that they finally drew clear of the encampment.

  The distance from the Atuatuci to the Marsi was no more than a hundred miles, and the countryside was fairly flat. But between Long-haired Gaul of the Belgae and Germania flowed the biggest river in all of western Europa: the Rhenus. Somehow Sulla had to get his wife’s wagon across it. And somehow he had to protect his family from marauders. He did it the Sullan way, very simply and directly, by trusting to his bond with the goddess Fortuna, who did not desert him.

  When they reached the Rhenus, they found its banks populous and the people not interested in preying upon one lone wagon and one lone German, especially with red-haired twin boys sitting one in each of their mother’s arms. A barge big enough to carry the wagon plied the great river regularly, the price a jar of most precious wheat; since the summer had been relatively dry, the water was at its quietest, and Sulla for the payment of three jars of wheat was able to get all Hermana’s beasts across as well as the wagon.

  Once into Germania they made brisk progress, for the land this far downstream of the Rhenus was cleared of vast forests, and some simple growing was attempted, more for winter cattle fodder than human consumption. During the third week of October Sulla found Hermana’s tribe of the Marsi, and delivered her into their care. And concluded his treaty of peace and friendship between the German Marsi and the Senate and People of Rome.

  Then when the moment of actual parting came, they wept in dreadful grief, finding it harder by far than either of them had dreamed. Carrying the twins, Hermana followed Sulla on foot until the legs of his horse wore her to a standstill, and there she stood, howling, long after he had passed out of her sight forever. While Sulla rode his horse southwest, so blinded by tears he had to trust to the instincts of this horse for many miles.

  Hermana’s people had given him a good mount, so that he was able to trade it for another good mount at the end of the day, and so continued well mounted for the twelve days it took him to ride from the sources of the river Amisia, where lay the Marsi settlements, to Marius’s camp outside Glanum. He cut cross-country the whole way, avoiding the high mountains and thickest forests by following the great rivers—Rhenus to Mosella, Mosella to Arar, Arar to Rhodanus.

  His heart lay so heavy within him that he had to force himself to take note of the country and peoples he traversed, though once he caught himself listening with amazement to himself speaking the Gallic of the Druids, and thought, I am fluent in German of several dialects and fluent in Carnutic Gallic—I, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, senator of Rome!

  But what neither he nor Quintus Sertorius discovered of the German dispositions among the Atuatuci did not transpire until the following spring, long after both Sulla and Sertorius were gone from their lives and wives of Germania. For when the wagons began to roll in their thousands upon thousands and the three great hosts divided up to invade Italy, the Cimbri and the Teutones and the Tigurini and the Cherusci and the Marcomanni left something behind for the Atuatuci to guard against their return. They left a force of six thousand of their finest men to ensure that the Atuatuci suffered no incursions from other tribes; and they left every last tribal treasure they, owned—gold statues, gold chariots, gold harness, gold votives, gold coins, gold bullion, several tons of finest amber, and various other treasures they had picked up along their migration to swell what had been theirs for many generations. The only gold which moved with the Germans as they, started out was gold they wore on their bodies. All the rest remained hidden among the Atuatuci, in much the same way as the Volcae Tectosages of Tolosa had minded the gold of the Gallic peoples.

  *

  So when Sulla saw Julilla again, he contrasted her with Hermana, and found her slipshod, careless, intellectually untutored, disordered and unmethodical, and—hateful. She had at least learned enough from their previous reunion not to throw herself at him immodestly under the gaze of their servants. But, he thought wearily over dinner on that first day home, his being spared that particular ordeal was more likely to have been due to the presence of Marcia in the house rather than a wish on Julilla’s part to please him. For Marcia was quite a presence—stiff, straight, unsmiling, unloving, unforgiving. She hadn’t aged gracefully, and after so many years of happiness as the wife of Gaius Julius Caesar, her widowhood was a great burden to her. Also, Sulla suspected, she loathed being the mother of a daughter as unsatisfactory as Julilla.

  Little wonder in that. He loathed being married to a wife as unsatisfactory as Julilla. Yet it was not politic to cast her off, for she was no Metella Calva, coupling indiscriminately with the lowborn, nor did she couple with the highborn. Fidelity had become perhaps her only virtue. Unfortunately the drinking had not progressed to the point where everyone in Rome knew her as a wine bibber; Marcia had worked indefatigably to conceal it. Which meant that a diffarreatio divorce (even had he been willing to undergo its hideousness) was out of the question.

  And yet she was impossible to live with. Her physical demands within the bedroom were so starved and scratchy that he could experience no emotion more scorching than a ghastly, all-pervading embarrassment; he only had to set eyes on Julilla, and every iota of erectile tissue belonging to his body shrank inside itself like one of Publius Vagiennius’s snails. He didn’t want to touch her, and he didn’t want her touching him.

  It was easy for a woman to counterfeit sexual desire, sexual pleasure too, but a man couldn’t counterfeit sexual desire any more than he could sexual pleasure. If men were by nature more truthful than women, thought Sulla, it was surely because they carried a tattletale truth teller between their legs into every sexual encounter, and this colored all aspects of masculine life.
And if there was a reason why men were drawn to men, it lay in the fact that the act of love required no accompanying act of faith.

  None of these cogitations boded well for Julilla, who had no idea what her husband thought, but was devastated by the all-too-evident little he felt. For two nights in succession she found herself pushed away, while Sulla’s patience frayed and his excuses grew more perfunctory, less convincing. And on the third morning Julilla rose even earlier than Sulla so that she could have a copious breakfast of wine, only to be caught in the act by her mother.

  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 n
eck. 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.