The Grass Crown (55 page)

Helplessly Philippus, Caepio, Catulus Caesar, and their followers, with Metellus Pius the Piglet hovering indecisively on the outskirts, watched Drusus conduct his contiones all through the last half of October, and into November. At first the meetings tended to be stormy, a condition Drusus dealt with beautifully, permitting every man a hearing, and even permitting massed voices, yet never succumbing to the tyranny or the seduction of the crowd. When a gathering grew too heated, he disbanded it. In the beginning, Caepio had tried to break the meetings up with violence, but that formerly tried and true technique of the Comitia didn’t work with Drusus, who seemed to have an inbuilt instinct as to when violence was likely to erupt, and again, dismissed his meeting before it could erupt.

Six contiones, seven, eight… And each one quieter than the last, each one seeing an audience more reconciled to the inevitability of this piece of legislation. Water on stone, Drusus wore his opponents down with unfailing grace and dignity, admirable good temper, ever-present reasonableness. He made his enemies look crass, ill-mannered, oafish.

“It is the only way,” he said to Scaurus Princeps Senatus after the eighth contio, standing with him on the steps of the House, from which vantage point Scaurus had watched.

“What the noble Roman politician lacks is patience. Luckily that is a quality I possess in abundance. I cope with them, all those who come to listen, and they like that. They like me! I have been patient with them, and they have grown to trust me.”

“You’re the first man since Gaius Marius whom they have genuinely liked,” said Scaurus reminiscently.

“With good reason,” said Drusus. “Gaius Marius is another man they feel they can trust. He appeals to them because of his quite wonderful directness, his strength, his air of being one of them rather than a Roman nobleman. I don’t have his natural advantages—I cannot be other than I am, a Roman nobleman. But patience has won out, Marcus Aemilius. They have learned to trust me.”

“And you really think the time has come for a vote?”

“I do.”

“Shall I gather the others? We can dine at my house.”

“Today above all days, I think we should dine at my house,” said Drusus. “Tomorrow will seal my fate, one way or the other.”

Scaurus hurried off to find Marius, Scaevola, and Antonius Orator. When he saw Sulla, he waved to him as well. “I’m bearing an invitation from Marcus Livius. Dinner at his house, Lucius Cornelius?” And, seeing the look of antisocial reluctance appear on Sulla’s face, he added impulsively, “Oh, do come! There will be no one there to poke or pry, Lucius Cornelius!”

The look vanished. Sulla actually produced a smile. “All right then, Marcus Aemilius, I’ll come.”

At the beginning of September the six men would have had the walk to themselves, for though Drusus had many clients, it was not normal practice for the clients to follow their patron home at the end of business in the Forum. Dawn was when they gathered at the patron’s house. Yet on this day of the eighth contio, Drusus’s following in the Comitia had grown so hugely that he and his five noble companions were the center of an excited crowd some two hundred strong. The escort was not comprised of important men, or wealthy men. Of the Third and Fourth Classes, even some of the Head Count, they had come to admire, wanting to honor this steadfast, indomitable, integral man. Since his second contio they had gathered to escort him home in ever-increasing numbers, and were particularly eager to do so today because the morrow would see the vote.

“So it’s for tomorrow,” said Sulla to Drusus as they walked.

“Yes, Lucius Cornelius. They have learned to know me and to trust me, from the knights with the plebeian power to all these small men surrounding us now. I can see no point in postponing the vote any longer. There’s a kind of fulcrum involved. If I am to succeed, I will succeed tomorrow.”

“There’s no doubt you will succeed, Marcus Livius,” said Marius contentedly. “And I for one will be voting for you.”

It was a very short walk; across the lower Forum to the Vestal Steps, a right turn onto the Clivus Victoriae, and Drusus’s house was upon them.

“Come in, come in, my friends!” Drusus said cheerily to the crowd. “Go through to the atrium, and I will take my leave of you there.” To Scaurus he said very quietly, “Take the rest to my study and wait. I shan’t be long, but it’s courtesy to speak to them before I dismiss them.”

While Scaurus and the other four noblemen hastened ahead to the study, Drusus shepherded his straggling escort through the vast peristyle-garden to the great double doors on the back wall of the colonnade at its far end. Beyond them lay the atrium, a lovely room vivid with colors, but dim now because the sun had gone down. For some time he stood in the middle of his admirers, joking and laughing, exhorting them to vote the right way on the morrow; in small groups they began to take their leave of him, those men about him dwindling away until only a few were left. The brief twilight was fading, and the shadows of that moment just before the lamps were lighted turned the recesses behind the pillars and in the many alcoves into impenetrable darkness.

Oh, wonderful! The last few were turning to go. One of the men brushed hard against Drusus in the gloom, he felt the sinus of his toga yanked down, experienced a sharp and burning pain in his right groin, and bit back the noise he almost made because, though they were his admirers, these men were strangers nonetheless. Now they were hurrying, exclaiming at the way the light had suddenly gone, and anxious to get themselves home before night transformed the alleys of Rome into defiles boiling with dangers.

Half-blinded by pain, Drusus stood in the doorway looking along the garden, his left arm raised, encumbered by the multiple folds of his toga; he watched until the door warden at the far end of the peristyle had let the men out into the street, then turned to walk to his study, where his friends waited. But the moment he moved, that inexplicable and dazzling pain exploded into fury. He could not stifle this scream, it ripped its way out of him with as little mercy as a harpy. Something warm and liquid was suddenly pouring down his right leg. Frightening!

When Scaurus and the others burst out of the study, Drusus was standing with legs already buckling, his hand clasped against his right hip; he took the hand away and gazed at it in astonishment, for it was covered in blood. His blood. Down on his knees, he subsided slowly to the floor like a billowing sack with the air trapped beneath it, and lay, eyes wide open, gasping in growing pain.

It was Marius, not Scaurus, who took control. He freed the right hip from folds of toga until the hilt of a knife protruding from the upper part of Drusus’s groin became visible, an answer to the mystery.

“Lucius Cornelius, Quintus Mucius, Marcus Antonius, each of you go for a different doctor,” Marius said crisply. “Princeps Senatus, have the lamps lit immediately—all of them!”

Without warning Drusus screamed again, a horrifying noise which rose to the starry painted sky of his atrium ceiling and lingered there like some audible bat blundering from beam to beam; and the atrium came to life, slaves flying everywhere crying out, Cratippus the steward helping Scaurus light the lamps, Cornelia Scipionis running into the room with all six children in her wake, rushing to her son’s side, kneeling on a floor now awash with blood.

“Assassin,” said Marius tersely.

“I must send for his brother,” said the mother, getting to her feet with the skirt of her gown soaked in blood.

No one noticed the six children, who crept up behind Marius and gaped at the scene on the floor, enormous eyes taking in the spreading sheet of blood, their uncle’s awful twisted face, the dirty stubby thing growing out of his lower belly. He screamed now continuously, the pain growing as the internal bleeding compressed the great nerve-trunks feeding the leg; at each new cry of agony the children jumped, flinched, whimpered, until Young Caepio recollected himself enough to take his scrawny little brother Cato within his arm and push Cato’s quivering head against his chest, cutting off the sight of Uncle Marcus from little Cato’s bulging eyes.

Only when Cornelia Scipionis returned were the children seen, banished under the escort of a weeping and shivering nurserymaid; the mother knelt again opposite Marius, as helpless as he.

Sulla appeared at that moment, almost literally carrying Apollodorous Siculus, whom he threw to the ground beside Marius. “The cold-hearted mentula didn’t want to leave his dinner.”

“He must be taken to his bed before I can examine him,” said the Sicilian Greek physician, still breathless from Sulla’s assault.

So Marius, Sulla, Cratippus and two other servants lifted the shrieking Drusus from the floor, dragging a broad trail of bright red blood behind them from the soaked toga as they carried him to his big bed, where he and Servilia Caepionis had tried vainly for so many years to make children. The room, a small one, had been so stuffed with lamps it seemed as bright as day to those who dumped Drusus down.

Other doctors were arriving; Marius and Sulla left them to it, joining the others in the atrium, from which place they could still hear Drusus screaming, screaming. When Mamercus ran in, Marius pointed toward the master’s bedroom, but made no move to follow.

“We can’t leave,” said Scaurus, looking very old.

“No, we can’t,” said Marius, feeling very old.

“Then let’s move back to the study. We’ll be less in the way,” said Sulla, trembling from a combination of shock and the effort of dragging a reluctant doctor away from his dinner couch.

“Jupiter, I don’t believe it!” cried Antonius Orator.

“Caepio?” asked Scaevola, shivering.

“I’d pick Varius the Spaniard cur,” said Sulla, teeth showing.

They settled in the study feeling useless, impotent, as men do who are used to directing things, their ears still assaulted by those terrible cries emanating from the bedroom. But they hadn’t been in the study long when they discovered that Cornelia Scipionis was a true member of her formidable clan, for even in the midst of this ordeal she found the time to have wine and food sent to them, and gave them the services of a slave.

When the doctors finally managed to remove the knife, it turned out to be ideal for the purpose upon which it had been employed; a wicked little wide-bladed, curved-bladed shoemaker’s knife.

“It has been twisted completely around inside the wound,” said Apollodorus Siculus to Mamercus above the remorseless racket of Drusus’s cries.

“What does that mean?” asked Mamercus, sweating in the heat of so many tiny tongues of flame, incapable yet of appreciating any of the implications, let alone all of them.

“Everything is torn beyond repair, Mamercus Aemilius. The blood vessels, the nerves, the bladder, even, I think, the bowel.”

“Can’t you give him something for the pain?”

“I have already administered syrup of poppies, but I will give him more. Unfortunately I do not think it will help.”

“What will help?” demanded Mamercus.

“Nothing.”

“Are you saying my son is going to die?” asked Cornelia Scipionis incredulously.

“Yes, domina,” said the doctor with dignity. “Marcus Livius is bleeding both internally and externally, and we have not the skill to stop either. He must die.”

“In such pain? Can you do nothing for that?” asked the mother.

“There is no more effective drug in our pharmacopoeia than syrup of Anatolian poppies, domina. If that does not help him, nothing will.”

All through the long night Drusus lay on his bed screaming, screaming, screaming. The sound of his agony penetrated into every last inch of that fabulous house, reached the ears of the six children huddled together in the nursery for company and comfort, little Cato’s head still buried in his brother’s arms, all of them weeping and whimpering, the memory of Uncle Marcus on the floor burning their minds and spoiling their lives, already spoiled from so much tragedy.

But Young Caepio cradled his little brother Cato fiercely, kissing his hair. “See, I am here! Nothing can hurt you!”

On the Clivus Victoriae people kept gathering until the crowd stretched for three hundred paces in either direction; even out there the sound of Drusus’s screaming was audible, echoed by sighs and sobs, smaller cries of smaller yet no less real pain.

Inside, the Senate had gathered in the atrium, though Caepio did not come, nor Philippus, a prudent decision; and nor, noted Lucius Cornelius Sulla, poking his head round the door of the study, had Quintus Varius. Something moved in a pool of darkness near the exit to the loggia; Sulla slid silently around and out to see. A girl, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, dark and pretty.

“What do you want?” he asked, suddenly materializing in front of her, a lamp directly behind him.

She gasped as she looked up at the fiery halo of red-gold hair, thinking for a moment that she looked at the dead Cato Salonianus; her eyes blazed hate, then died down. “And who are you to ask me that?” she snapped with huge hauteur.

“Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Who are you?”

“Servilia.”

“Back to bed, young lady. This is no place for you.”

“I’m looking for my father,” she said.

“Quintus Servilius Caepio?”

“Yes, yes, my father!”

Sulla laughed, not caring enough about her to spare her. “Why would he be here, silly child, when half the world suspects him of having Marcus Livius murdered?”

Her eyes lit up again, this time with joy. “Is he truly going to die? Truly?”

“Yes.”

“Good!” she said savagely, opened a door, and disappeared.

Sulla shrugged, went back to the study.

Shortly after dawn, Cratippus appeared. “Marcus Aemilius, Gaius Marius, Marcus Antonius Lucius Cornelius, Quintus Mucius, the master is asking to see you.”

The screams had died down to sporadic, gurgling moans; the men in the study understood the meaning of this, and made haste behind the steward, pushing through the clusters of senators waiting in the atrium.

Drusus lay, his skin as white as the sheets, his face no more than a mask in which someone diabolical had inserted a brilliant, vital, beautiful pair of great dark eyes. To one side of him stood Cornelia Scipionis, tearless and rigid; to the other side stood Mamercus Aemilius Lepidus Livianus, tearless and rigid. The doctors had all gone.