Fortune's Favorites (69 page)

“For thirty years and more,” he said to the slack-featured Vatia and Appius Claudius, “I have denied my nature. I have denied myself love and pleasure-at first for the sake of my name and my ambition, and later-when these had run their course-for the sake of Rome. But it is over. Over, over, over! I hereby give Rome back to you-to all you little, cocksure, maggot-minded men! You are at liberty once more to vent your spleen on your poor country-to elect the wrong men, to spend the public moneys foolishly, to think not beyond tomorrow and your own gigantic selves. In the thirty years of one generation I predict that you and those who succeed you will bring ruin beyond redemption upon Rome's undeserving head!”

His hand went up to touch the face of his supporter, very tenderly and intimately. “You know who this is, of course, any of you who go to the theater. Metrobius. My boy. Always and forever my boy!” And he turned, pulled the dark head down, kissed Metrobius full upon the mouth.

Then with a hiccough and a giggle he allowed himself to be helped back to his drunken ass, and hoisted upon it. The tawdry procession re-formed and weaved off through the gate down the common line of the Via Latina and the Via Appia, with half the people from the marketplace following and cheering.

No one in the senatorial party knew where to look, especially after Vatia burst into noisy tears. So for want of firmer guidance they drifted off in ones and twos, Appius Claudius trying to give comfort to the devastated Vatia.

“I don't believe it!” said Cethegus to Philippus.

“I think we must,” said Philippus. “That's why he invited us to this parade of travesties. How else could he begin to shake us loose from his bonds?”

“Shake us loose? What do you mean?”

“You heard him. For thirty years and more he has denied his nature. He fooled me. He fooled everyone who matters. And what an exquisite revenge this day has been for a ruined childhood! Rome has been controlled, directed and healed by a deviate. We've been diddled by a mountebank. How he must have laughed!”

He did laugh. He laughed all the way to Misenum, carried in a flower-decked litter with Metrobius by his side and accompanied by his Bacchic revelers, all invited to stay in his villa as his guests for as long as they wanted. The party had been augmented by Roscius the comedian and Sorex the arch-mime, as well as many lesser theatrical lights.

They descended upon the newly renovated villa which once had been a fitting home for Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi and teemed irreverently through its hallowed portals, Sulla in their midst still riding upon his inebriated ass.

“Liber Pater!” they called him, saluting him with blown kisses and little trills on their pipes; and he, so drunk he was only half conscious, chuckled and whinnied and whooped.

The party went on for a market interval, notable mainly for the enormous amounts of food and wine that were consumed and the number of uninvited guests who poured in from all the surrounding villas and villages. Their host, rollicking and carousing, took them to his heart and introduced them to sexual high jinks most of them had never even heard of.

Only Valeria was left out of things, entirely of her own choice; she had taken one look at the arrival of her husband and fled to her own rooms, there to lock herself in and weep. But, said Metrobius after he had persuaded her to open her door,

“It won't always be so unbearable, lady. He's been looking forward to this for so long that you must give him his head. In a few days' time he'll pay for it-he'll be terribly ill and not at all inclined to be the life of the party.”

“You're his lover,” she said, feeling nothing beyond a black, despairing confusion.

“I have been his lover for more years than you have seen the sun,” said Metrobius gently. “I belong to him. I always have. But so do you belong to him.”

“Love between men is disgusting!”

“Nonsense. That's your father and your brother and all of those cousins talking. How do you know? What have you seen of life, Valeria Messala, beyond the dismally confined isolation of a Roman noblewoman's lot? My presence doesn't mean you're not necessary to him, any more than your presence means I'm not necessary to him. If you want to stay, you're going to have to accept the fact that there have been- and still are!-many loves in Sulla's life.”

“I don't have much choice, really,” she said, almost to herself. “Either I go back to my brother's house, or I learn to get on amid this riotous assemblage.”

“That is so,” he said, smiled at her with understanding and considerable affection, then leaned across to caress the back of her neck, which somehow he seemed to know ached from the effort of holding up her proud patrician head.

“You're far too good for him,” she said, surprising herself.

“All that I am, I owe to him,” said Metrobius gravely. “If it had not been for him I would be nothing more than an actor.”

“Well, there seems no alternative other than to join this circus! Though if you don't mind, not at its height. I have not the sinews or the training for such revelry. When you think he needs me, tell me.”

And so they left it. As Metrobius had predicted, some eight days after the commencement of his binge Sulla's underlying ailments asserted themselves and the revelers were sent home. The arch-mime, Sorex, and Roscius the comedian slunk away to their suites and hid, while Valeria and Metrobius and Lucius Tuccius dealt with the ravages his breakout had inflicted upon Sulla. Who was sometimes grateful, and sometimes very difficult to help.

But, returned eventually to some vestige of tranquillity and health, the ex-Dictator applied himself to the writing of his memoirs; a paean, he informed Valeria and Metrobius, to Rome and men like Catulus Caesar-as well as to himself- besides being a metaphorical assassination of Gaius Marius, Cinna, Carbo, and their followers.

By the end of the old year and the end of the consulships of Vatia and Appius Claudius, Sulla's regimen at Misenum was so well established that the whole villa oscillated through his cycles in a fairly placid way. For a while he would scribble away at his memoirs, chuckling whenever his pen produced a particularly apt and vitriolic phrase at Gaius Marius's expense; while writing his book on the war against Jugurtha he was delirious with pleasure at the thought that now in his own words he admitted it was his personal feat in capturing Jugurtha won the war-and that Marius had deliberately suppressed this fact. Then the pen and paper would be put away and Sulla would embark upon an orgy of privately staged comedies and mimes, or else would throw a gigantic party lasting a whole market interval. He varied all these activities with others as they occurred to his ever-fertile imagination, including mock hunts with naked young boys and girls the quarry, competitions to see who could come up with the most bizarre posture for sexual intercourse, elaborate charades wherein the participants were able to requisition almost anything by way of costume or trapping. He held joke parties, nude parties by moonlight, daytime parties beside his vast white marble swimming pool while the revelers watched, enraptured, the sport of naked youths and maidens in the water. There seemed no end to his invention, nor an end to his passion for novelties of every sexual kind; though it was noticed that he indulged in no practices involving cruelty or animals, and that upon discovering one guest so inclined, he had the man driven from his house.

There could be no doubt, however, that his physical well-being was deteriorating. After the New Year had come and gone, his own sexual prowess flagged badly; by the end of February nothing had the power to stimulate him. And when this happened, his mood and temper took a turn for the worse.

Only one of his highborn Roman friends sought out Sulla's company after the move to Misenum. Lucullus. Who had been in Africa with his brother during Quinctilis, personally supervising the capture of beasts for their games at the beginning of September. When he returned to Rome halfway through Sextilis he found the city still in an uproar constantly fueled by reports of the newest extravagances at the villa in Misenum, and was subjected to scandalized litanies of Sulla's behavior.

“All you who judge him, look first to yourselves,” Lucullus said stiffly. “He is entitled to do whatever he chooses.”

But it was not until several days after the conclusion of the ludi Romani in September that Lucullus could spare time to visit Sulla, whom he found in one of his more lucid intervals, at work on the memoirs and full of glee at what he was doing to the reputation and deeds of Gaius Marius.

“You're the only one, Lucullus,” he said, a trace of the old Sulla flickering in his rheumy, pain-racked eyes.

“No one has any right to criticize you!” Lucullus said, nostrils pinched. “You gave up everything for Rome.”

“True, I did. And I don't deny it was hard. But my dear boy, if I hadn't denied myself for all those years I wouldn't be enjoying this present excess half so much!”

“I can see where it might have its attractions,” Lucullus said, eyes following the gyrations of an exquisite female child just budding into puberty as she danced naked for Sulla in the sun outside his window.

“Yes, you like them young, don't you?” Sulla chuckled, leaned forward to grasp Lucullus by the arm. “You'd better stay to see the end of her dance. Then you can take her for a walk.”

“What have you done with their mothers?”

“Nothing. I buy them from their mothers.”

Lucullus stayed. And came back often.

But in March, his fires dead, Sulla became extremely hard to handle, even for Metrobius and Valeria, who had learned to work as a team. Somehow-she didn't quite know how- Valeria had found herself pregnant. By Sulla, she hoped. But couldn't tell him, and dreaded the day when her condition became apparent. It had happened about the turn of the year, when Lucullus had produced some peculiar fungi he said he had found in Africa and the inner circle of friends had eaten of them, including Valeria. In some nightmarish dream she half-remembered every man present enjoying her, from Sulla to Sorex and even Metrobius. It was the only incident she could blame, and fear ruled her after she realized its appalling outcome.

Sulla's temper tantrums were terrible, endless hours of screaming and ranting during which he had to be restrained from doing harm to all who strayed across his path, from the children he used as playthings for his friends to the old women who did most of the laundering and cleaning up; as he kept a company of his Sullani always by him, those who did restrain him understood full well that they imperiled themselves.

“He cannot be allowed to kill people!” cried Metrobius.

“Oh, I wish he'd reconcile himself to what's happening!” said Valeria, weeping.

“You're not well yourself, lady.”

An imprudent thing to say in a kind voice; out tumbled the story of the pregnancy, and Metrobius too remembered.

“Who knows?'' he laughed, delighted, “I might still produce a child! The chance is one in four.”

“Five.”

“Four, Valeria. The child cannot be Sulla's.”

“He'll kill me!”

“Take each day as it comes and say nothing to Sulla,” the actor said firmly. “The future is impenetrable.”

Shortly after this Sulla developed a pain in the region of his liver that gave him no peace. Up and down the long expanse of the atrium he shuffled day and night, unable to sit, unable to lie, unable to rest. His sole comfort was the white marble bath near his room, in which he would float until the whole cycle began again with the pacing, pacing, pacing, up and down the atrium. He whinged and whimpered, would get himself to the wall and have to be dissuaded from beating his head against it, so great was his torment.

“The silly fellow who empties his chamber pot started to spread a story that Lucius Cornelius is being eaten up by worms,” said Tuccius the doctor to Metrobius and Valeria, his face a study in contempt. “Honestly, the ignorance of most people about the way bodies work and what constitutes a disease almost drives me to the wineskin! Until this pain began, Lucius Cornelius availed himself of the latrine. But now he's forced to use a chamber pot, and its contents are busy with worms. Do you think I can convince the servants that worms are natural, that everyone has them, that they live inside our bowels in a lifelong companionship? No!”

“The worms don't eat?” whispered Valeria, chalk-white.

“Only what we have already eaten,” said Tuccius. “No doubt the next time I visit Rome, I'll hear the story there too. Servants are the most efficient gossips in the world.”

“I think you've relieved my mind,” said Metrobius.

“I do not intend to, only to disabuse you of servants' tales should you hear them. The reality is serious enough. His urine,” Lucius Tuccius went on, “tastes sweeter than honey, and his skin smells of ripe apples.”

Metrobius grimaced. “You actually tasted his urine?”

“I did, but only after I performed an old trick that was shown to me by a wisewoman when I was a child. I put some of his urine in a dish outside, and every kind of insect swarmed to drink it. Lucius Cornelius is pissing concentrated honey.”

“And losing weight almost visibly,” said Metrobius.

Valeria gasped, gagged. “Is he dying?”

“Oh, yes,” said Lucius Tuccius. “Besides the honey-I do not know what that means save that it is mortal-his liver is diseased. Too much wine.”

The dark eyes glistened with tears; Metrobius winked them away. His lip quivered, he sighed. “It is to be expected.”

“What will we do?” asked the wife.

“Just see it out, lady.” Together they watched Lucius Tuccius patter away to deal with the patient. Then Metrobius said sad words in a voice which held no trace of sadness. “So many years I have loved him. Once a very long time ago I begged him to keep me with him, even though it would have meant I exchanged a comfortable life for a hard one. He declined.”

“He loved you too much,” said Valeria sentimentally.

“No! He was in love with the idea of his patrician birth. He knew where he was going, and where he was going mattered more than I did by far.” He turned to look down into her face, brows up. “Haven't you yet realized that love always means different things to different people, and that love given is not always returned in like measure? I have never blamed him. How could I when I am not inside his skin? And at the last, having sent me away so many times, he acknowledged me before his colleagues. 'My boy!' I would endure it all again to hear him say those words to men like Vatia and Lepidus.”