Fortune's Favorites (24 page)

Seeming not to need sleep, Sulla rode thereafter back to Rome, but did not enter the city. His messenger sent on ahead summoned the Senate to a meeting in the temple of Bellona on the Campus Martius. En route to Bellona, he paused to make sure the six thousand prisoners were assembled in the grounds of the Villa Publica (which was close to the temple of Bellona), and issued certain orders; after that he completed his journey, and dismounted from his mule in the rather desolate and unkempt open space in front of the temple always called “Enemy Territory.”

No one of course had dared not to answer Sulla's summons, so about a hundred men waited inside. They all stood; it did not seem the right thing to do to wait for Sulla seated on their folding stools. A few men looked serenely comfortable-Catulus, Hortensius, Lepidus-and some looked terrified-a Flaccus or two, a Fimbria, a minor Carbo-but most bore the look of sheep, vacuous yet skittish.

Clad in armor but bareheaded, Sulla passed through their ranks as if they did not exist and mounted the podium of Bellona's statue, which had been added to her temple after it became very fashionable to anthropomorphize even the old Roman gods; as she too was clad for war, she matched Sulla very well, even to the fierce look on her too-Greek face. She, however, owned a kind of beauty, whereas Sulla had none. To most of the men present, his appearance came as an absolute shock, though no one dared to stir. The wig of orange curls was slightly askew, the scarlet tunic filthy, the red patches on his face standing out amid remnants of near-albino skin like lakes of blood on snow. Many among them grieved, but for differing reasons: some because they had known him well and liked him, others because they had at least expected the new Master of Rome to look a fitting master. This man looked more a ruined travesty.

When he spoke his lips flapped, and some of his words were hard to distinguish. Until, that is, he got under way, when self-preservation stimulated his audience to total comprehension.

“I can see I'm back not a moment too soon!” he said. “The Enemy Territory is full of weeds-everything needs a fresh coat of paint and a good wash-the stones of the road bases are poking through what's left of the surface-laundresses are using the Villa Publica to hang out their washing- a wonderful job you've been doing of caring for Rome! Fools! Knaves! Jackasses!”

His address probably continued in the same vein-biting, sarcastic, bitter. But after he yelled “Jackasses!” his words were drowned by a hideous cacophony of noises from the direction of the Villa Publica-screams, howls, shrieks. Bloodcurdling! At first everyone pretended they could still hear him, but then the sounds became just too alarming, too horrifying; the senators began to move, mutter, exchange terrified glances.

As suddenly as it had begun, the din died away.

“What, little sheep, are you frightened?” jeered Sulla. “But there's no need to be frightened! What you hear is only my men admonishing a few criminals.”

Whereupon he scrambled down from his perch between Bellona's feet and walked out without seeming to see a single member of the Senate of Rome.

“Oh dear, he's really not in a good mood!” said Catulus to his brother-in-law Hortensius.

“Looking like that, I'm not surprised,” said Hortensius.

“He only dragged us here to listen to that,” said Lepidus. “Who was he admonishing, do you imagine?”

“His prisoners,” said Catulus.

As proved to be the case; while Sulla had been speaking to the Senate, his men had executed the six thousand prisoners at the Villa Publica with sword and arrow.

“I am going to be extremely well behaved on all occasions,” said Catulus to Hortensius.

“Why, in particular?” asked Hortensius, who was a far more arrogant and positive man.

“Because Lepidus was right. Sulla only summoned us here to listen to the noise of the men who opposed him dying. What he says doesn't matter one iota. But what he does matters enormously to any of us who want to live. We will have to behave ourselves and try not to annoy him.”

Hortensius shrugged. “I think you're overreacting, my dear Quintus Lutatius. In a few weeks he'll be gone. He'll get the Senate and the Assemblies to legalize his deeds and give him back his imperium, then he'll return to the ranks of the consulars in the front row, and Rome will be able to get on with her normal business.”

“Do you really think so?” Catulus shivered. “How he'll do it I have no idea, but I believe we're going to have Sulla's unnerving eyes on us from a position of superior power for a long time to come.”

Sulla arrived at Praeneste the following day, the third one of the month of November.

Ofella greeted him cheerfully, and gestured toward two sad men who stood under guard nearby. “Know them?” he asked.

“Possibly, but I can't find their names.”

“Two junior tribunes attached to Scipio's legions. They came galloping like a pair of Greek jockeys the morning after you fought outside the Colline Gate and tried to tell me that the battle was lost and you were dead.”

“What, Ofella? Didn't you believe them?”

Ofella laughed heartily. “I know you better than that, Lucius Cornelius! It will take more than a few Samnites to kill you.” And with the flourish of a magician producing a rabbit out of a chamber pot, Ofella reached behind him and displayed the head of Young Marius.

“Ah!” said Sulla, inspecting it closely. “Handsome fellow, wasn't he? Took after his mother in looks, of course. Don't know who he took after in cleverness, but it certainly wasn't his dad.” Satisfied, he waved the head away. “Keep it for the time being. So Praeneste surrendered?”

“Almost immediately after I fired in the heads Catilina brought me. The gates popped open and they flooded out waving white flags and beating their breasts.”

“Young Marius too?” asked Sulla, surprised.

“Oh, no! He took to the sewers, looking for some way to escape. But I'd had all the outflows barred months before. We found him huddled against one such with his sword in his belly and his Greek servant weeping nearby,” Ofella said.

“Well, he's the last of them!” said Sulla triumphantly.

Ofella glanced at him sharply; it wasn't like Lucius Cornelius Sulla to forget anything! “There's still one at large,” he said quickly, then could have bitten off his tongue. This was not a man to remind that he too had shortcomings!

But Sulla appeared unruffled. A slow smile grew. “Carbo, I suppose you mean?”

“Yes, Carbo.”

“Carbo is dead too, my dear Ofella. Young Pompeius took him captive and executed him for treason in the agora at Lilybaeum late in September. Remarkable fellow, Pompeius! I thought it would take him many months to organize Sicily and round up Carbo, but he did the lot in one month. And found the time to send me Carbo's head by special messenger! Pickled in a jar of vinegar! Unmistakably him.” And Sulla chuckled.

“What about Old Brutus?”

“Committed suicide rather than tell Pompeius whereabouts Carbo had gone. Not that it mattered. The crew of his ship-he was trying to raise a fleet for Carbo-told Pompeius everything, of course. So my amazingly efficient young legate sent his brother-in-law off to Cossura, whence Carbo had fled, and had him brought back to Lilybaeum in chains. But I got three heads from Pompeius, not two. Carbo, Old Brutus, and Soranus.”

“Soranus? Do you mean Quintus Valerius Soranus the scholar, who was tribune of the plebs?”

“The very same.”

“But why? What did he do?” asked Ofella, bewildered.

“He shouted the secret name of Rome out loud from the rostra,” said Sulla.

Ofella's jaw dropped, he shivered. “Jupiter!”

“Luckily,” lied Sulla blandly, “the Great God stoppered up every ear in the Forum, so Soranus shouted to the deaf. All is well, my dear Ofella. Rome will survive.”

“Oh, that's a relief!” gasped Ofella, wiping the sweat from his brow. “I've heard of strange doings, but to tell Rome's secret name-it passes all imagination!” Something else occurred to him; he couldn't help but ask: “What was Pompeius doing in Sicily, Lucius Cornelius?”

“Securing the grain harvest for me.”

“I'd heard something to that effect, but I confess I didn't believe it. He's a kid.”

“Mmmm,” agreed Sulla pensively. “However, what Young Marius didn't inherit from his father, young Pompeius certainly grabbed from Pompeius Strabo! And more besides.”

“So the kid will be coming home soon,” said Ofella, not very enamored of this new star in Sulla's sky; he had thought himself without rival in that firmament!

“Not yet,” said Sulla in a matter-of-fact tone. “I sent him on to Africa to secure our province for me. I believe he is at this moment doing just that.” He pointed down into No Man's Land, where a great crowd of men stood abjectly in the chilly sun. “Are they those who surrendered bearing arms?”

“Yes. In number, twelve thousand. A mixed catch,” said Ofella, glad to see the subject change. “Some Romans who belonged to Young Marius, a good many Praenestians, and some Samnites for good measure. Do you want to look at them more closely?”

It seemed Sulla did. But not for long. He pardoned the Romans among the crowd, then ordered the Praenestians and Samnites executed on the spot. After which he made the surviving citizens of Praeneste-old men, women, children- bury the bodies in No Man's Land. He toured the town, never having been there before, and frowned in anger to see the shambles to which Young Marius's need for timber to build his siege tower had reduced the precinct of Fortuna Primigenia.

“I am Fortune's favorite,” he said to those members of the town council who had not died in No Man's Land, “and I shall see that your Fortuna Primigenia acquires the most splendid precinct in all of Italy. But at Praeneste's expense.”

On the fourth day of November, Sulla rode to Norba, though he knew its fate long before he reached it.

“They agreed to surrender,” said Mamercus, tight-lipped with anger, “and then they torched the town before killing every last person in there-murder, suicide. Women, children, Ahenobarbus's soldiers, all the men of the town died rather than surrender. I'm sorry, Lucius Cornelius. There will be no plunder or prisoners from Norba.”

“It doesn't matter,” said Sulla indifferently. “The haul from Praeneste was huge. I doubt Norba could have yielded much of use or note.”

And on the fifth day of November, when the newly risen sun was glancing off the gilded statues atop the temple roofs and that fresh light made the city seem less shabby, Lucius Cornelius Sulla entered Rome. He rode in through the Capena Gate, and in solemn procession. His groom led the white horse which had borne him safely through the battle at the Colline Gate, and he wore his best suit of armor, its silver muscled cuirass tooled with a scene representing his own army offering him his Grass Crown outside the walls of Nola. Paired with him and clad in purple-bordered toga rode Lucius Valerius Flaccus, the Princeps Senatus, and behind him rode his legates in pairs, including Metellus Pius and Varro Lucullus, who had been summoned from Italian Gaul four days earlier, and had driven hard to be here on this great occasion. Of all the ones who were to matter in the future, only Pompey and Varro the Sabine were not present.

His sole military escort was the seven hundred troopers who had saved him by bluffing the Samnites; his army was back in the defile, tearing down its ramparts so that traffic on the Via Latina could move again. After that, there was Ofella's wall to dismember and a vast stockpile of building material to dump in several fields. Much of the tufa block had been fragmented in the demolition, and Sulla knew what he was going to do with that; it would be incorporated into the opus incertum construction of the new temple of Fortuna Primigenia in Praeneste. No trace of the hostilities must remain.

Many people turned out of doors to see him enter the city; no matter how fraught with peril it was, no Roman could ever resist a spectacle, and this moment belonged to History. Many who saw him ride in genuinely believed they were witnessing the death throes of the Republic; rumor insisted that Sulla intended to make himself King of Rome. How else could he hang on to power? For how–given what he had done–could he dare relinquish power? And, it was quickly noted, a special squad of cavalry rode just behind the last pair of legates, their spears held upright; impaled on those lances were the heads of Carbo and Young Marius, Carrinas and Censorinus, Old Brutus and Marius Gratidianus, Brutus Damasippus and Pontius Telesinus, Gutta of Capua and Soranus–and Gaius Papius Mutilus of the Samnites.

Mutilus had heard the news of the battle at the Colline Gate a day after, and wept so loudly that Bastia came to see what was the matter with him.

“Lost, all lost!” he cried to her, forgetting the way she had insulted and tormented him, only seeing the one person left to whom he was bound by ties of family and time. “My army is dead! Sulla has won! Sulla will be King of Rome and Samnium will be no more!”

For perhaps as long as it would have taken to light all the wicks of a small chandelier, Bastia stared at the devastated man upon his couch. She made no move to comfort him, said no words of comfort either, just stood very still, eyes wide. And then a look crept into them of knowledge and resolution; her vivid face grew cold and hard. She clapped her hands.

“Yes, domina?” asked the steward from the doorway, gazing in consternation at his weeping master.

“Find his German and ready his litter,” said Bastia.

“Domina?” the steward asked, bewildered.

“Don't just stand there, do as I say! At once!”

The steward gulped, disappeared.

Tears drying, Mutilus gaped at his wife. “What is this?”

“I want you out of here,” she said through clenched teeth. “I want no part of this defeat! I want to keep my home, my money, my life! So out you go, Gaius Papius! Go back to Aesernia, or go to Bovianum-or anywhere else you have a house! Anywhere but this house! I do not intend to go down with you.”

“I don't believe this!” he gasped.

“You'd better believe it! Out you go!”

“But I'm paralyzed, Bastia! I am your husband, and I'm paralyzed! Can't you find pity in you, if not love?”