Colleen McCullough - 1. First Man in Rome

And by the end of November an east wind blew Gaius Marius a smacking kiss from the goddess Fortuna, in the shape of a second letter from Saturninus that arrived by sea two days before the Senate courier and his dispatches reached Glanum. Saturninus said, very humbly:

I do not doubt you will reach Rome. Not one day after I received your chastening note, your esteemed colleague Lucius Aurelius Orestes, the junior consul, died suddenly. And, still feeling the lash of your displeasure, I seized upon this opportunity to force the Senate into recalling you. That had not been the plan formulated by the Policy Makers, who through the agency of the Leader of the House recommended that the Conscript Fathers choose a consul suffectus to fill the ivory chair left vacant by Orestes. But amazing luck! only the day before, Scaurus had delivered a long speech in the House to the effect that your presence in Gaul-across-the-Alps was an affront to the credulity of all Good Men, that you had manufactured the German panic to get yourself elected a virtual dictator. Of course the moment Orestes died, Scaurus changed his tune completely the House did not dare recall you to exercise the electoral functions of the consul with the German menace threatening Italy, so the House must appoint a suffect consul to get the elections under way. Having had no time to start using my tribunate to postpone any elections, I now found it unnecessary to do so. Instead, I rose in the House and made a very fine speech to the effect that our esteemed Princeps Senatus couldn't have it both ways. Either there was a German menace, or there was not. And I chose to accept his speech of the day before as his honest opinion there was no German menace, therefore there was no need to fill the dead junior consul's chair with a suffectus. No, I said, Gaius Marius must be recalled; Gaius Marius must finally do the job he had been elected to do carry out the duties of a consul. I didn't need to accuse Scaurus of altering his viewpoint to fit the new set of circumstances in his second speech; everyone got the message. Hopefully this will beat the courier. The time of year favors the sea over the road. Not that you are not perfectly capable of working out what must have been the sequence of events the moment you get the Senate's communication! Only that if I do beat the courier, you have a little extra time to plan your campaign in Rome. I am starting things moving among the electors, naturally, and by the time you reach Rome you should have a most respectable deputation of leading lights of the People begging you to stand for the consulship.

"We're on our way!" said Marius jubilantly to Sulla, tossing him Saturninus's letter. "Pack your things there's no time to lose. You are going to tell the House that the Germans will invade Italy on three separate fronts in the autumn of next year, and I am going to tell the electors that I am the only man capable of stopping them." "How far do I go?" asked Sulla, startled. "Only as far as you have to. I'll introduce the subject, and state the findings. You'll testify to their truth, but not in a way which gives the House to understand that you became a barbarian yourself." Marius looked rueful. "Some things, Lucius Cornelius, are best left unsaid. They don't know you well enough yet to understand what kind of man you are. Don't give them information they can use against you later on. You're a patrician Roman. So let them think your daring deeds were done inside a patrician Roman skin." Sulla shook his head. "It's manifestly impossible to go prowling among the Germans looking like a patrician Roman!" "They don't know that," said Marius with a grin. "Remember what Publius Rutilius said in his letter? The armchair generals on the back benches, he called them. Well, they're armchair spies too, on the front benches as well as the back. They would not know the rules for spying if the rules ran up their arses!" And he began to laugh. "In fact, I wish I'd asked you to keep your moustaches and long hair for a little while. I'd have dressed you as a German and paraded you around the Forum. And you know what would happen, don't you?" Sulla sighed. "Yes. No one would recognize me." "Correct. So we won't put unbearable strain on their Roman imaginations. I'll be speaking first, and you take your cue from me," said Marius.

* * *

To Sulla, Rome offered none of the political vigor or domestic warmth it did to Gaius Marius. In spite of his brilliant quaestorship under Marius and his brilliant career as a spy under Marius he was just another one of the Senate's young up-and-coming men, walking in the shadow of the First Man in Rome. Nor was his future political career going anywhere fast enough, especially considering his late entry into the Senate; he was patrician and therefore not permitted to become a tribune of the plebs, he didn't have the money to run for curule aedile, and he hadn't been in the Senate long enough to run for praetor. That was the political side of things. At home he found a bitter and enervating atmosphere polluted by a wife who drank too much and neglected her children, and by a mother-in-law who disliked him quite as much as she disliked her situation. That was the domestic side of things. Well, the political climate would improve for him, he was not so depressed he couldn't see it; but the climate in his home could do nothing else than deteriorate. And what made it harder coming to Rome this time was that he was passing from his German wife to his Roman one. For just about a year he had lived with Hermana in the midst of an environment more alien to his aristocratic world than the old world of the Suburan stews had been. And Hermana was his solace, his fortress, his one normal point of reference in that bizarre barbarian society. Tacking himself onto the Cimbric comet's tail had not been difficult, for Sulla was more than just another brave and physically strong warrior; he was a warrior who thought. In bravery and physical strength many of the Germans left him far behind. But where they were an unalloyed metal, he was the tempered finality cunning as well as brave, slippery as well as strong. Sulla was the small man facing the giant, the man who, in order to excel in armed combat, had no other way of going about it than to think. Therefore he had been noticed on the field against the Spanish tribes of the Pyrenees at once, and accepted into the warrior confraternity. Then he and Sertorius had agreed that if they were to blend into this strange world to the point where they would rise high enough to be privy to German policies (such as they were), they would have to be more than useful soldiers. They would have to carve themselves niches in tribal life. So they had separated, chosen different tribes, and then taken women from among the ranks of those women recently widowed. His eye had lighted upon Hermana because she was an outsider herself, and because she had no children. Her man had been the chief of his Cimbric tribe; otherwise the women of the tribe would never have tolerated her foreign presence among them when, in effect, she usurped a place which ought to have been filled by a Cimbric woman. And the angry women were already clubbing her to death inside their minds when Sulla a meteor among the warriors climbed into her wagon and thereby established his claim to her. They would be foreigners together. There was no sentiment or attraction of any kind in his selection of the Cheruscic Hermana; simply, she needed him more than a Cimbric woman would have within the tribal enclave, and also owed the tribe far less than a Cimbric woman would have. Thus if she should discover his Roman origins, Hermana would be far less likely to report him than a Cimbric woman. As German women went, she was very ordinary. Most were tall, strongly yet gracefully built, with long legs and high breasts, flaxen hair, the bluest of eyes and fair of face if one could forgive the ugliness of wide mouths and straight little noses. Hermana was a great deal shorter even than Sulla (who as Romans went was a respectable height at about three inches less than six feet Marius, an inch over six feet, was very tall), and plumper than most of her fellows. Though her hair was extremely thick and long, it was definitely of that indeterminate shade universally known as mouse, and her eyes were a darkish grey-fawn to match her hair. For the rest, she was German enough the bones of her skull were well defined, and her nose was like a short straight blade, fine and thin. She was thirty years old, and had been barren; if her man had not been the chief, and autocratic to the point of refusing to cast her off, Hermana would have died. What made her distinctive enough to have been the choice of two men of superior quality in succession was not obvious on the surface. Her first man had called her different and interesting, but could be no more specific; Sulla thought her a natural aristocrat, a finicky aloof lady who yet radiated a powerfully sexual message. They fitted together very well in every way, for she was intelligent enough to be undemanding, sensible enough not to trammel him, passionate enough to make bedding her a pleasure, articulate enough to make her an interesting communicant, and industrious enough to give him no additional work. Hermana's beasts were always herded together properly, branded properly, milked properly, mated properly, medicined properly. Hermana's wagon was always in tiptop condition, its canopy kept taut and patched or mended, its wooden tray oiled and chinked, its big wheels greased with a mixture of butter and beef drippings along the axle junctions and linch-pins, and never missing spokes or segments of their rims. Hermana's pots and crocks and vessels were kept clean; her provisions were carefully stored against damp and marauders; her clothing and rugs were aired and darned; her killing and quartering knives were superbly sharp; her oddments were never put away in some place she forgot. Hermana, in fact, was everything Julilla was not. Except a Roman of blood as good as his own. When she discovered she was pregnant in fact, she fell at once both of them were delighted, Hermana for one extra reason. She was now vindicated in the eyes of the tribe to which she did not belong, and the blame for her previous sterility was now thrown squarely upon the shoulders of her dead chieftain. A fact which didn't please the women of the tribe one little bit, for they had long hated her. Not that there was much they could do about it, because by spring, when the Cimbri set off on their trek northward to the lands of the Atuatuci, Sulla was the new chief. Hermana, it might safely be inferred, had more than her share of luck. And then in Sextilis, after a wearying yet uncomplaining gestation, Hermana gave birth to twin boys, big and healthy and red-haired; Sulla called one Herman, and the other Cornel. He had racked his brains to think of a name which would in some way perpetuate his gens, Cornelius, yet wouldn't sound too odd in the German tongue. "Cornel" was his solution. The babies were everything twin boys ought to be: so alike it was difficult to tell them apart, even for their mother and father; content to be together; more interested in thriving than crying. Twins were rare, and their birth to this strange outlander couple was considered an omen important enough to secure Sulla the thaneship of a whole group of small tribes. In consequence, he went to the grand council Boiorix called of all the Germans of all three peoples after the King of the Cimbri settled Atuatuci-Teutonic friction without bloodshed. For some time, of course, Sulla had known he would soon have to leave, but he put off his departure until after that grand council, aware that he worried over what should have been a very minor consideration what would happen to Hermana and his sons once he was gone? The men of his tribe he might possibly have trusted, but the women were not to be trusted, and in any domestic tribal situation, the women would prevail. The moment he disappeared, Hermana would die under the clubs, even if her sons were allowed to survive. It was September, and time was of the essence. Yet Sulla made a decision which ran counter both to self-interest and Rome's interest. Though he could ill afford the time, before he returned to Marius he would take Hermana back to her own people in Germania. That meant he had to tell her who and what he was. She was more fascinated than surprised; he saw her eyes turn to their sons with wonder in them, as if now she truly understood how important they were, these sons of a demigod. No grief appeared on her face when he told her he would have to leave her forever, but gratitude did when he told her he would first deliver her to the Marsi of Germania, in the hope that among her own settled people she would be protected and allowed to live. At the beginning of October they left the gargantuan enclave of Germans wagons, during the first hours of darkness, having chosen a site for their wagons and beasts from which their departure was less likely to attract notice. When day broke they were still wending their way between German wagons, but no one paid them any attention, and two days after that they finally drew clear of the encampment. The distance from the Atuatuci to the Marsi was no more than a hundred miles, and the countryside was fairly flat. But between Long-haired Gaul of the Belgae and Germania flowed the biggest river in all of western Europa: the Rhenus. Somehow Sulla had to get his wife's wagon across it. And somehow he had to protect his family from marauders. He did it the Sullan way, very simply and directly, by trusting to his bond with the goddess Fortuna, who did not desert him. When they reached the Rhenus, they found its banks populous and the people not interested in preying upon one lone wagon and one lone German, especially with red-haired twin boys sitting one in each of their mother's arms. A barge big enough to carry the wagon plied the great river regularly, the price a jar of most precious wheat; since the summer had been relatively dry, the water was at its quietest, and Sulla for the payment of three jars of wheat was able to get all Hermana's beasts across as well as the wagon. Once into Germania they made brisk progress, for the land this far downstream of the Rhenus was cleared of vast forests, and some simple growing was attempted, more for winter cattle fodder than human consumption. During the third week of October Sulla found Hermana's tribe of the Marsi, and delivered her into their care. And concluded his treaty of peace and friendship between the German Marsi and the Senate and People of Rome. Then when the moment of actual parting came, they wept in dreadful grief, finding it harder by far than either of them had dreamed. Carrying the twins, Hermana followed Sulla on foot until the legs of his horse wore her to a standstill, and there she stood, howling, long after he had passed out of her sight forever. While Sulla rode his horse southwest, so blinded by tears he had to trust to the instincts of this horse for many miles. Hermana's people had given him a good mount, so that he was able to trade it for another good mount at the end of the day, and so continued well mounted for the twelve days it took him to ride from the sources of the river Amisia, where lay the Marsi settlements, to Marius's camp outside Glanum. He cut cross-country the whole way, avoiding the high mountains and thickest forests by following the great rivers Rhenus to Mosella, Mosella to Arar, Arar to Rhodanus. His heart lay so heavy within him that he had to force himself to take note of the country and peoples he traversed, though once he caught himself listening with amazement to himself speaking the Gallic of the Druids, and thought, I am fluent in German of several dialects and fluent in Carnutic Gallic I, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, senator of Rome! But what neither he nor Quintus Sertorius discovered of the German dispositions among the Atuatuci did not transpire until the following spring, long after both Sulla and Sertorius were gone from their lives and wives of Germania. For when the wagons began to roll in their thousands upon thousands and the three great hosts divided up to invade Italy, the Cimbri and the Teutones and the Tigurini and the Cherusci and the Marcomanni left something behind for the Atuatuci to guard against their return. They left a force of six thousand of their finest men to ensure that the Atuatuci suffered no incursions from other tribes; and they left every last tribal treasure they, owned gold statues, gold chariots, gold harness, gold votives, gold coins, gold bullion, several tons of finest amber, and various other treasures they had picked up along their migration to swell what had been theirs for many generations. The only gold which moved with the Germans as they, started out was gold they wore on their bodies. All the rest remained hidden among the Atuatuci, in much the same way as the Volcae Tectosages of Tolosa had minded the gold of the Gallic peoples.