The Grass Crown

"How many loyal men have I got in Sinope?"

  "More by far, I think, than she has. She is a woman, my King, therefore crueler and more treacherous by far than any man. Who could trust her? Those who follow her have done so for great promotions, but they rely upon Pharnaces to ensure promotion. I think they also rely upon Pharnaces killing her once he's well established on the throne. However, most of the court was proof against their blandishments."

  "Good! I leave it to you, Gordius, to alert my loyal people as to what is going on. Tell them to be ready at any hour of the day or night," said the King.

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Let her try to kill me, the sow! I know her. She's my sister. So it won't be knife or bow and arrow. She'll choose poison. Something really nasty, so I suffer."

  "Great One, let me arrest her and Pharnaces at once, please!" whispered Gordius frantically. "Poison is so insidious! What if, in spite of every precaution, she should trick you into swallowing hemlock, or put an adder in your bed? Please, let me arrest them now! It will be easier.""

  But the King shook his head. "I need proof, Gordius. So let her try to poison me. Let her find whatever noxious plant or mushroom or reptile she thinks will suit her purpose best, and let her administer it to me."

  "My King, my King!" quavered Gordius, appalled.

  "There's no need to worry, Gordius," said Mithridates, his calm unimpaired, no atom of fear in his voice. "It is not generally known—even to Laodice—that during the seven years when I hid from the vengeance of my mother, I rendered myself immune to every kind of poison known to men—and some no one has yet discovered, except me. I am the world's greatest authority upon the subject of poisons, I can say that with truth. Do you think all these scars I bear are the result of weapons? No! I have scarred myself, Gordius, to make sure that not one of my relatives can succeed in eliminating me by the easiest and least impeachable method we know—by poison."

  "So young!" marveled Gordius.

  "Better to stay alive to grow old, say I! No one is going to take my throne from me."

  "But how did you render yourself immune, Great One?"

  "Take the Egyptian asp, for example," said the King, warming to his theme. "You know the creature—big wide hood and little head swaying between its wings. I brought in a box of them in every size, and I started with the little ones, made them bite me. Then I worked up to the biggest one of all, a monster seven feet long and thick as my arm. By the time I was finished, Gordius, that thing could strike me, and I never even became ill! I did the same with adders and pythons, scorpions and spiders. Then I took a drop of every poison—hemlock, wolfsbane, mandragora, cherry seed pulp, brews of berries and bushes and roots, the Death Cap mushroom and the white-spotted red mushroom—yes, Gordius, I took them all! Increasing the dose a drop at a time until even a cup of any poison had no effect. And I have continued to keep myself immune—I continue to take poison, I continue to let myself be bitten. And I take antidotes." Mithridates laughed softly. "Let Laodice do her worst! She can't kill me."

  But she tried, during the state banquet she gave to celebrate the King's safe return. As the whole court was invited, the big throne room was cleared and furnished with dozens of couches, the walls and pillars were decked with garlands of flowers, and the floor strewn with perfumed petals. Sinope's best musicians had been summoned, a traveling troupe of Greek actors was commissioned to give a performance of the Elektra of Euripedes, and the famous dancer Anais of Nisibis was brought from Amisus, where she was summering on the Euxine.

  Though in ancient times the Kings of Pontus had eaten sitting at tables like their Thracian ancestors, they had long espoused the Greek habit of reclining upon couches, and fancied in consequence that they were finished products of Greek culture, genuinely Hellenized monarchs.

  How thin that layer of Hellenism was became evident when the courtiers entered the throne room one by one and prostrated themselves flat on the ground before their King; if additional evidence was necessary, it was furnished during the agonizing space of time after Queen Laodice, smiling seductively, offered her Scythian goblet of gold to the King, licking at its rim with her pink tongue.

  "Drink from my cup, husband," she commanded, but gently.

  Without hesitation Mithridates drank, a good deep draft which halved the goblet's contents; he put it down on the table in front of the couch he shared with Queen Laodice. But the last mouthful of wine he kept in his mouth, rolling it round as he stared with his brown-flecked, grape-green eyes at his sister. Then he frowned, but not direfully; a thoughtful, reminiscent sort of frown that changed in a twinkling to a wide smile.

  "Dorycnion!" he said delightedly.

  The Queen went white. The court stilled, for he spoke the word loudly, and this welcome-home feast had so far been quiet.

  The King turned his head to the left. "Gordius," he said.

  "My King?" asked Gordius, sliding quickly from his couch.

  "Come here and help me, would you?"

  Four years older than her brother, Laodice was very like him—not surprising in a house where brother had married sister often enough down the generations to compound family resemblances. A big but well-proportioned woman, the Queen had taken special care with her appearance; her golden hair was done in Greek style, her greenish-brown eyes ringed with stibium, her cheeks daubed with red chalk-powder, her lips carmined, and her hands and feet dark brown from henna. The white ribbon of the diadem bisected her forehead, its tasseled ends straying across her shoulders. She looked every inch the Queen, and such had been her intention.

  Now she read her fate in her brother's face, and twisted her body to leave the couch. But not quickly enough; he grasped the hand she used to propel herself backward and yanked her across the bank of cushions she had reclined against until she half lay, half sat within the King's arm. And Gordius was there, kneeling at her other side, his face ugly with a wild triumph; for he knew what reward he was going to ask for—that his daughter Nysa, a minor wife, be elevated to Queen, and that her son, Pharnaces, therefore take precedence over Laodice's son, Machares.

  Laodice turned her head helplessly to see four barons march her lover Pharnaces up to the King, who gazed at him impassively. Then the King swung his attention back to her.

  "I will not die, Laodice," he said. "In fact, this paltry brew won't even make me sick." He smiled, genuinely amused. "However, there's more than enough left to kill you."

  Her nose was nipped between the thumb and forefinger of the King's left hand, he tilted her head back, and she gasped, mouth falling open at once, for terror had taken her breath away, she could not hold it. A little at a time, he poured the contents of her beautiful golden Scythian goblet down her throat, making Gordius clamp her mouth shut between each application, himself stroking her neck voluptuously to make swallowing easier. She did not struggle, deeming it beneath her to do so; a Mithridatid was not afraid to die, especially when there had been a chance to snatch at the throne.

  When it was done and the goblet was empty, Mithridates laid his sister full-length upon the couch, there before the horrified eyes of her lover.

  "Don't try to vomit it up, Laodice," the King said pleasantly. "If you do, I'll only make you drink it a second time."

  Those in the room waited, silent, still, terrified. How long a wait it was no one afterward could tell, except (had they asked him, which they did not) the King.

  He turned to his courtiers, male and female, and began to address them in much the same tones as a teacher of philosophy might have used in imparting his expertise to new students. For everyone there the King's knowledge of poisons came as a revelation, a side to the King that was to circulate swifter than rumor from one end of Pontus to the other, and from there to the outside world; Gordius added his additional information, and the words Mithridates and poison became linked together in legend forever.

  "The Queen," said the King, "could not have chosen better than dorycnion, which the Egyptians call trychnos. Alexander the
Great's general, Ptolemy who later became King of Egypt, brought the plant back from India, where it grows, they say, to the height of a tree, though in Egypt it remains the height of a woody bush, with leaves akin to those of our common sage. Next to aconiton it is the best of all poisons—very sure! You will notice as the Queen dies that consciousness is not lost until the last breath is drawn—indeed, from personal experience I can assure you that all one's perceptions are exquisitely heightened, one looks out at a world more important and visionary than the normal state of being could ever suggest. Cousin Pharnaces, I must tell you that every heartbeat you suffer, the least flutter of your eyelids, your gasps as you feel her pain, she will take inside her as never, never before. A pity, perhaps, that she can take no more of you inside her, eh?" He glanced at his sister, nodded. "Watch now, it's beginning to happen."

  Laodice's gaze was fixed on Pharnaces, who stood between his guardians staring doggedly at the floor, the look in her eyes something no one in the room ever forgot, though many tried; pain and horror, exaltation and sorrow, a rich and ever-changing gamut of emotions. She said nothing, it became obvious because she could not, for slowly her lips stretched away from her big yellow teeth, and slowly her neck curved and her spine arched so that the back of her head strained to meet the backs of her knees. Then came fine and rhythmic tremors which slowly increased in size as they decreased in frequency, until they turned into massive jerks of head and body and all four limbs.

  "She's having a fit!" cried Gordius shrilly.

  "Of course she is," said Mithridates rather scornfully. "It's the fit will kill her, wait and see." He watched her with a genuine clinical interest, having suffered minor variations of this himself, but never in front of his big silver mirror. "It is my ambition," he remarked to the people in the room as Laodice's convulsions dragged on and on and on without let, "to develop a universal antidote, a magic elixir to cure the effect of any poison, be it a poison of plant or animal or fish or inanimate substance. As it is, every day I must sip a concoction composed of no less than one hundred different poisons, otherwise I will lose my immunity. And after that, I must sip a concoction composed of no less than one hundred antidotes." Said he in an aside to Gordius, "If I don't take the antidotes, I confess I feel a little unwell."

  "Understandable, Great One," croaked Gordius, trembling so violently he dreaded the King's noticing.

  "Not long now," said Mithridates.

  Nor was it. Laodice's jerks grew grosser and sloppier as her body literally wore itself out. But still her eyes held feeling, awareness, and only closed tiredly at the moment she died. Not once did she look at her brother; though that may have been because she was looking at Pharnaces when the rigors clamped down, and after that, even the muscles controlling the direction of her eyes would not answer their devastated owner.

  "Excellent!" cried the King heartily, and nodded at Pharnaces. "Kill him," he Said.

  No one had the courage to ask how, with the result that Pharnaces met his death more prosaically than poor Laodice, beneath the blade of a sword. And everyone who had seen the Queen die absorbed the lesson; there would be no more attempts upon the life of the sixth King Mithridates for a long time to come.

  7

  Bithynia, as Marius discovered when he journeyed overland from Pessinus to Nicomedia, was very rich. Like all of Asia Minor, it was mountainous, but except for the massif of Mysian Olympus at Prusa, the Bithynian ranges were somewhat lower, rounder, less forbidding than the Taurus. A multitude of rivers watered the countryside, which had been cleared and settled for a long time. Sufficient wheat was grown to feed the people and the army, with enough left over to fetch the price of Bithynia's tribute to Rome. Pulses grew well, and sheep thrived. There were vegetables and fruit aplenty. The people, Marius noted, looked well fed, content, healthy; each village Marius and his family passed through seemed populous and prosperous.

  Such, however, was not the story he got from the second King Nicomedes when he arrived in Nicomedia, and was installed in the palace as the King's honored guest. As palaces went, this one was fairly small, but, Julia was quick to inform Marius, the art works were immensely valuable, and the materials of which the building was constructed were of the very best, the architecture brilliant.

  "King Nicomedes is far from a poor man," Julia said.

  "Alas!" sighed King Nicomedes, "I am a very poor man, Gaius Marius! As I rule a poor country, that is to be expected, I suppose. But Rome doesn't make it easy, either."

  They were sitting on a balcony overlooking the city on its inlet, the water so calm that everything from mountains to shoreline structures was reflected as perfectly as in a mirror; it made Nicomedia seem, thought the fascinated Marius, suspended in midair, as if a world went on beneath it as much as above it, from a parade of donkeys walking upside down to the clouds which floated in the sky-blue middle of the inlet.

  "How do you mean, King?" asked Marius.

  "Well, take that disgraceful business with Lucius Licinius Lucullus only five years ago," said Nicomedes. "He came in the early spring demanding two legions of auxiliaries to fight a war against slaves in Sicily, he said." The King's voice grew petulant. "I explained to him that I had no troops to give him, thanks to the activities of the Roman tax-farmers, who carry off my people as slaves. 'Free my enslaved people according to the decree of the Senate freeing all slaves of Allied status throughout all Roman territories!' I said to him. 'Then I will have an army again, and my country will know prosperity again.' But do you know what he answered? That the Senate's decree was directed at slaves of Italian Allied status!"

  "He was right," said Marius, stretching out his legs. "Had the decree covered slaves of nations owning a Friend and Ally of the Roman People treaty, you would have received official notification of the fact from the Senate." He directed a keen glance at the King from beneath his brows. "As I remember, you did find the troops for Lucius Licinius Lucullus."

  "Not as many as he wanted, but yes, I did find him men. Or rather, he found the men for himself," said Nicomedes. "After I told him there were no men available, he rode out of Nicomedia into the countryside, and came back some days later to tell me that he could see no shortage of men. I tried to tell him that the men he had seen were farmers, not soldiers, but all he said was that farmers made excellent soldiers, so they would do nicely. Thus were my troubles compounded, for he took seven thousand of the very men I needed to keep my kingdom solvent!"

  "You got them back a year later," said Marius, "and they came back with money in their purses, at that."

  "A year during which not enough was grown," said the King stubbornly. "A year of low production, Gaius Marius, under the system of tribute Rome levies, sets us back a decade."

  “What I want to know is why there are tax-gatherers in Bithynia at all," said Marius, aware the King was finding it harder and harder to prove his contentions. "Bithynia is not a part of the Roman Asia Province."

  Nicomedes wriggled. "The trouble is, Gaius Marius, that some of my subjects have borrowed money from the Roman publicani of Asia Province. Times are difficult."

  "Why are times difficult, King?" Marius persisted. "I would have thought that—certainly since the Sicilian slave war broke out—you must be enjoying increasing prosperity. You grow plenty of grain. You could grow more. Rome's agents were buying grain for inflated prices for a number of years, especially in this part of the world. In fact, neither you nor Asia Province could provide half the quantity our agents were commissioned to buy. The bulk of it, I understand, came from lands under the rule of King Mithridates of Pontus."

  Ah, that was it! Marius's remorseless probing finally lifted the crust on top of Bithynia's festering sore; out came all the poison in a rush.

  "Mithridates!" the King spat, rearing back in his chair. "Yes, Gaius Marius, there you have the adder in my backyard! There you have the cause of Bithynia's fading prosperity! It cost me one hundred talents of gold I could ill afford to buy support in Rome when he applied to b
e made a Friend and Ally of the Roman People! It costs me many times more than that each and every year to police my outlands against his sly incursions! I am forced to keep a standing army because of Mithridates, and no country can afford the expense of that! Look at what he did in Galatia only three years ago! Mass slaughter at a feast! Four hundred thanes perished at the congress in Ancyra, and now he rules every nation around me—Phrygia, Galatia, coastal Paphlagonia. I tell you plainly, Gaius Marius, that unless Mithridates is stopped now, even Rome will rue the day she did nothing!"

  "So I think too," said Marius. "However, Anatolia is a long way from Rome, and I very much doubt anyone in Rome is fully aware of what might happen here. Except perhaps Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus, and he's growing old. It is my intent to meet this King Mithridates, and warn him. Perhaps when I return to Rome, I can persuade the Senate to take Pontus more seriously."

  "Let us dine," said Nicomedes, rising. "We can continue our talk later. Oh, it is good to speak to someone who cares!"

  To Julia, this sojourn in an oriental court was a completely new experience; we Roman women should agitate to travel more, she thought, for I see now how narrow we are, how ignorant of the rest of the world. And it must tell in the way we raise our children. Particularly our sons.

  The first regnant individual she had ever met, the second Nicomedes was a revelation, for naturally she had assumed all kings were something like a patrician Roman of consular status—haughty, erudite, stately, magnificent. Un-Roman Catulus Caesars, or even un-Roman Scaurus Princeps Senatuses; there was no denying that Scaurus Princeps Senatus, despite his small stature and shiny bald pate, conducted himself right royally.

  What a revelation indeed was this second Nicomedes! Very tall, he had obviously once been heavily built, but extreme old age had taken its toll of height and weight, so that, at well over eighty, he was skinny and bent and hobbling, with empty dewlaps beneath his chin and sagging cheeks. Every tooth was gone from his head, and most of its hair as well. These, however, were purely physical states, and might be seen too on any octogenarian Roman consular. Scaevola Augur, for example. The difference lay in bearing and inner resources, thought Julia. For one thing, King Nicomedes was so effeminate she longed to laugh; he affected long, flowing garments of gauzy wool in truly exquisite colors; for meals he wore a golden wig of sausage-like curls, and was never without enormous jeweled earrings; his face was painted like a cheap whore's, and he kept his voice in the falsetto range. Of majesty he had none, and yet he had ruled Bithynia for over fifty years—ruled it with an iron hand, and successfully evaded every plot by either of his sons to dethrone him. Looking at him—and knowing that at all stages of his life from puberty onward he must have presented this same shrill, womanish personage to the world—it was extremely difficult for Julia to believe, for example, that he had efficiently disposed of his own father; or that he could preserve the loyalty and affection of his subjects.