Colleen McCullough - 3. Fortune's Favorites

The timing of this negotiation, it turned out, was exactly right. No longer possessed of either Young Marius or Pompey, Praecia had fallen into a doldrums wherein both stimulus and interest were utterly lacking. Comfortably off and determined to retain her independence, she was now far too old to be a creature of driving physical passions. As was true of so many of her less well known confederates in the art of love, Praecia had become an expert in sham. She was also an astute judge of character and highly intelligent. Thus she went into every sexual encounter from a superior position of power, sure of her capacity to please, and sure of her quarry. What she loved was the meddling in the affairs of men that normally had little or nothing to do with women. And what she loved most was political meddling. It was balm to intellect and disposition. When Pompey's arrival was announced to her, she didn't make the mistake of automatically assuming he had come to renew his liaison with her, though of course it crossed her mind because she had heard that his wife was pregnant. "My dear, dear Magnus!" she said with immense affability when he entered her study, and held out her hands to him. He bestowed a light kiss on each before retreating to a chair some feet away from where she reclined on a couch, heaving a sigh of pleasure so artificial that Praecia smiled. "Well, Magnus?" she asked. "Well, Praecia!" he said. "Everything as perfect as ever, I see has anyone ever found you and your surroundings less than perfect? Even if the call is unexpected?'' Praecia's tablinum she gave it the same name a man would have was a ravishing production in eggshell blue, cream, and precisely the right amount of gilt. As for herself she rose every day of her life to a toilet as thorough as it was protracted, and she emerged from it a finished work of art. Today she wore a quantity of tissue fine draperies in a soft sage green, and had done up her pale gold hair like Diana the Huntress, in disciplined piles with straying tendrils which looked absolutely natural rather than the result of much tweaking with the aid of a mirror. The beautiful cool planes of her face were not obviously painted; Praecia was far too clever to be crude when Fortune had been so kind, even though she was now forty. "How have you been keeping?" Pompey asked. "In good health, if not in good temper." "Why not good temper?" She shrugged, pouted. "What is there to mollify it? You don't come anymore! Nor does anyone else interesting." "I'm married again." "To a very strange woman." "Mucia, strange? Yes, I suppose she is. But I like her." "You would." He searched for a way into saying what he had to say, but could find no trigger and thus sat in silence, with Praecia gazing at him mockingly from her half sitting, half lying pose. Her eyes which were held to be her best feature, being very large and rather blindly blue positively danced with this derision. "I'm tired of this!" Pompey said suddenly. "I'm an emissary, Praecia. Not here on my own behalf, but on someone else's." "How intriguing!" "You have an admirer." "I have many admirers." "Not like this one." "And what makes him so different? Not to mention how he managed to send you to procure my services!'' Pompey reddened. "I'm caught in the middle, and I hate it! But I need him and he doesn't need me. So I'm here on his behalf." "You've already said that." "Take the barb out of your tongue, woman! I'm suffering enough. He's Cethegus." "Cethegus! Well, well!" said Praecia purringly. "He's very rich, very spoiled, and very nasty," said Pompey. "He could have done his own dirty work, but it amuses him to make me do it for him." "It's his price," she said, "to make you act as his pimp." "It is indeed." "You must want him very badly." "Just give me an answer! Yes or no?" "Are you done with me, Magnus?" "Yes." "Then my answer to Cethegus is yes." Pompey rose to his feet. "I thought you'd say no." "In other circumstances I would have loved to say no, but the truth is that I'm bored, Magnus. Cethegus is a power in the Senate, and I enjoy being associated with men of power. Besides, I see a new kind of power in it for me. I shall arrange it so that those who seek favors from Cethegus will have to do so through cultivating me. Very nice!" "Grr!" said Pompey, and departed. He didn't trust himself to see Cethegus; so he saw Lucius Marcius Philippus instead. "Praecia is willing," he said curtly. "Excellent, Magnus! But why look so unhappy?" "He made me pimp for him." "Oh, I'm sure it wasn't personal!" "Not much it wasn't!"

In the spring of that year Nola fell. For almost twelve years that Campanian city of Samnite persuasion had held out against Rome and Sulla, enduring one siege after another, mostly at the hands of this year's junior consul, Appius Claudius Pulcher. So it was logical that Sulla ordered Appius Claudius south to accept Nola's submission, and logical too that Appius Claudius took great pleasure in telling the city's magistrates the details of Sulla's unusually harsh conditions. Like Capua, Faesulae and Volaterrae, Nola was to keep no territory whatsoever; it all went to swell the Roman ager publicus. Nor were the men of Nola to be given the Roman citizenship. The Dictator's nephew, Publius Sulla, was given authority in the area, an added gall in view of last year's mission to sort out the tangled affairs of Pompeii, where Publius Sulla's brand of curt insensitivity had only ended in making a bad situation worse. But to Sulla the submission of Nola was a sign. He could depart with his luck intact when the place where he had won his Grass Crown was no more. So the months of May and June saw a steady trickle of his possessions wending their way to Misenum, and a team of builders toiled to complete certain commissions at his villa there a small theater, a delightful park complete with sylvan dells, waterfalls and many fountains, a huge deep pool, and several additional rooms apparently designed for parties and banquets. Not to mention six guest suites of such opulence that all Misenum was talking: who could Sulla be thinking of entertaining, the King of the Parthians? Then came Quinctilis, and the last in the series of Sulla's mock elections. To Catulus's chagrin, he was to be the junior consul; the senior was Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, a name no one had expected to hear in the light of his independent line in the Senate since Sulla had assumed the Dictatorship. At the beginning of the month Valeria Messala and the twins left for the Campanian countryside; everything at the villa was ready. In Rome, no one anticipated surprises. Sulla would go as he had come and as he had prevailed in an aura of dense respectability and ceremony. Rome was about to lose her first dictator in a hundred and twenty years, and her first ever dictator who had held the office for longer than six months. The ludi Apollinares, games first staged by Sulla's remote ancestor, came and went; so did the elections. And the day after the curule elections a huge crowd gathered in the lower Forum Romanum to witness Sulla's laying down of his self inflicted task. He was going to do this in public rather than within the Curia Hostilia of the Senate from the rostra, an hour after dawn. He did it with dignity and an impressive majesty, first dismissing his twenty four lictors with extreme courtesy and (for Sulla) costly gifts, then addressing the crowds from the rostra before going with the electors to the Campus Martius, where he oversaw the repeal of Flaccus Princeps Senatus's law appointing him Dictator. He went home from the Centuriate Assembly a private citizen, shorn of imperium and official auctoritas. "But I should like some of you to see me leave Rome," he said to the consuls Vatia and Appius Claudius, to Catulus, Lepidus, Cethegus, Philippus. "Be at the Porta Capena an hour after dawn tomorrow. Nowhere else, mind! Watch me say goodbye to Rome." They obeyed him to the letter, of course; Sulla might now be a privatus stripped of all magisterial power, but he had been the Dictator for far too long for any man to believe he truly lacked power. Sulla would be dangerous as long as he lived. Everyone bidden to the Porta Capena therefore came, though the three most favored Sullan protgs Lucullus, Mamercus and Pompey were not in Rome. Lucullus was on business for his games in September and Mamercus was in Cumae, while Pompey had gone back to Picenum to await the birth of his first child. When Pompey later heard of the events at the Capena Gate, he was profoundly thankful for his absence; Lucullus and Mamercus felt exactly the opposite. The marketplace inside the gate was jammed with busy folk going about their various activities selling, buying, peddling, teaching, strolling, flirting, eating. Of course the party in uniformly purple bordered togas was eyed with great interest; the usual volley of loud, anti upper class, derogatory insults was thrown from every direction, but the curule senators had heard it all before, and took absolutely no notice. Positioning themselves close to the imposing arch of the gate, they waited, talking idly. Not long afterward came the strains of music pipes, little drums, tuneful flutes, outlining and filling in an unmistakably Bacchic lay. A flutter ran through the marketplace throng, which separated, stunned, to permit the progress of the procession now appearing from the direction of the Palatine. First came flower decked harlots in flame colored togas, thumping their wrists against jingling tambourines, dipping their hands into the swollen sinuses of their togas to strew the route with drifts of rose petals. Then came freaks and dwarves, faces pugged or painted, some in horn bedecked masks sewn with bells, capering on malformed legs and clad in the motley of centunculi, vividly patched coats like fragmented rainbows. After them came the musicians, some wearing little more than flowers, others tricked out like prancing satyrs or fanciful eunuchs. In their midst, hedged about by giggling, dancing children, staggered a fat and drunken donkey with its hooves gilded, a garland of roses about its neck and its mournful ears poking out of holes in a wide brimmed, wreathed hat. On its purple blanketed back sat the equally drunken Sulla, waving a golden goblet which slopped an endless rain of wine, robed in a Tyrian purple tunic embroidered with gold, flowers around his neck and atop his head. Beside the donkey walked a very beautiful but obviously male woman, his thick black hair just sprinkled with white, his unfeminine physique draped in a semi transparent saffron woman's gown; he bore a large golden flagon, and every time the goblet in Sulla's right hand descended in his direction he topped up its splashing purple contents. Since the slope toward the gate was downward the procession gained a certain momentum it could not brake, so when the archway loomed immediately before it and Sulla started shouting blearily for a halt, everyone fell over squealing and shrieking, the women's legs kicking in the air and their hairy, red slashed pudenda on full display. The donkey staggered and cannoned into the wall of a fountain; Sulla teetered but was held up by the travestied flagon bearer alongside him, then toppled slowly into those strong arms. Righted, the Dictator commenced to walk toward the stupefied party of curule senators, though as he passed by one wildly flailing pair of quite lovely female legs, he bent to puddle his finger inside her cunnus, much to her hilarious and apparently orgasmic delight. As the escort regained its feet and clustered, singing and playing music and dancing still to the great joy of the gathering crowd Sulla arrived in front of the consuls to stand with his arm about his beautiful supporter, waving the cup of wine in an expansive salute. "Tacete!" yelled Sulla to the dancers and musicians. They quietened at once. But no other voices filled the silence. "Well, it's here at last!" he cried to whom, no one could be sure: perhaps to the sky. "My first day of freedom!" The golden goblet described circles in the air as the richly painted mouth bared its gums in the broadest and happiest of smiles. His whole face beneath the absurd ginger wig was painted as white as the patches of intact skin upon it, so that the livid areas of scar tissue were gone. But the effect was not what perhaps he had hoped, as the red outline of his mouth had run up into the many deep fissures starting under nose and on chin and foregathering at the lips; it looked like a red gash sewn loosely together with wide red stitches. But it smiled, smiled, smiled. Sulla was drunk, and he didn't care. "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!"