Colleen McCullough - 1. First Man in Rome

The mental trick had worked; Sulla came back to the present moment and the garishly painted, clumsily executed group of Apollo and Daphne. When his eyes drifted past it and encountered the even more ghastly statue of Perseus holding up the Gorgon's head, he almost leaped to his feet, strong enough now to deal with Stichus. He stalked down the garden toward the study, which was the room normally reserved for the sole use of the head of the household; by default, it had been given over to Sulla, who functioned more or less as the man-about-the-house. The pimply little fart was stuffing his face with candied figs when Sulla walked into the tablinum, poking his dirty sticky fingers through the rolls of books slowly accumulating in the pigeonholed walls. "Ohhhhhhh!" Stichus whinnied at sight of Sulla, snatching his hands away. "It's lucky I know you're too stupid to read," said Sulla, snapping his fingers at the servant in the doorway. "Here," he said to the servant, a costly pretty Greek not worth a tenth what Clitumna had paid, "get a bowl of water and a clean cloth, and wipe up the mess Master Stichus has made." His eerie eyes stared at Stichus with the fixed malice of a goat in them, and he said to that unfortunate, who was trying to wipe the syrup off his hands by rubbing them on his expensive tunic, "I wish you'd get it out of your head that I keep a store of naughty picture books! I don't. Why should I? I don't need them. Naughty picture books are for people who don't have the guts to do anything. People like you, Stichus." "One day," said Stichus, "this house and everything in it is going to be mine. You won't be so uppity then!" "I hope you're offering plenty of sacrifices to postpone that day, Lucius Gavius, because it's likely to be your last. If it weren't for Clitumna, I'd cut you up into little pieces and feed you to the dogs." Stichus stared at the toga on Sulla's powerful frame, raising his brows; he wasn't really afraid of Sulla, he'd known him too long, but he did sense that danger lurked inside Sulla's fiery head, therefore normally he trod warily. A mode of conduct reinforced by his knowledge that his silly old Auntie Clittie could not be swerved from her slavish devotion to the fellow. However, upon his arrival an hour earlier he had found his aunt and her boon companion Nicopolis in a fine state because their darling Lucius Cornelius had gone out in a rage wearing his toga. When Stichus dragged all of the story out of Clitumna, from Metrobius to the ensuing brawl, he was disgusted. Sickened. So now he flopped himself down in Sulla's chair and said, "My, my, we are looking every inch the Roman today! Been to the inauguration of the consuls, have we? What a laugh! Your ancestry isn't half as good as mine." Sulla picked him up out of the chair by clamping the fingers of his right hand on one side of Stichus's jaw and his right thumb on the other side, a hold so exquisitely painful that its victim couldn't even scream; by the time he recovered enough breath to do so, he had seen Sulla's face, and didn't, just stood as mute and graven as his aunt and her boon companion had at dawn that morning. "My ancestry," said Sulla pleasantly, "is no business of yours. Now get out of my room." "It won't be your room forever!" gasped Stichus, scuttling to the door and almost colliding with the returning slave, now bearing a bowl of water and a cloth. "Don't count on it" was Sulla's parting shot. The expensive slave sidled into the room trying to look demure. Sulla eyed him up and down sourly. "Clean it up, you mincing flower," he said, and went to find the women. Stichus had beaten Sulla to Clitumna, who was closeted with her precious nephew and was not to be disturbed, said the steward apologetically. So Sulla walked down the colonnade surrounding the peristyle-garden to the suite of rooms where his mistress Nicopolis lived. There were savory smells coming from the cookhouse at the far end of the garden, a site it shared with the bathroom and the latrine; like most houses on the Palatine, Clitumna's was connected to the water supply and the sewers, thus relieving the staff of the burden of fetching water from a public fountain and toting the contents of the chamber pots to the nearest public latrine or drain opening in the gutter. "You know, Lucius Cornelius," said Nicopolis, abandoning her fancy work, "if you would only come down out of your aristocratic high-flies occasionally, you'd do a lot better." He sat on a comfortable couch with a sigh, rugging himself up a little more warmly in his toga because the room was cold, and let the servant girl nicknamed Bithy remove his winter boots. She was a nice cheerful lass with an unpronounceable name, from the backwoods of Bithynia; Clitumna had picked her up cheap from her nephew and inadvertently acquired a treasure. When the girl finished unlacing the boots she bustled out of the room purposefully; in a moment she returned bearing a pair of thick warm socks which she smoothed carefully over Sulla's perfect, snow-white feet. "Thank you, Bithy," he said, smiling at her and reaching out a careless hand to ruffle her hair. She absolutely glowed. Funny little thing, he thought with a tenderness that surprised him, until he realized that she reminded him of the girl next door. Julilla ... "How do you mean?" he asked Nicopolis, who seemed as usual impervious to the cold. "Why should that greedy little crawler Stichus inherit everything when Clitumna goes to join her dubious ancestors? If you would only change your tactics a fraction, Lucius Cornelius my very dear friend, she'd leave the lot to you. And she's got a lot, believe me!" "What's he doing, bleating that I hurt him?" asked Sulla, taking a bowl of nuts from Bithy with another special smile. "Of course he is! And lavishly embroidering it, I'm sure. I don't blame you in the least, he's detestable, but he is her only blood kin and she loves him, so she's blind to his faults. But she loves you more, haughty wretch that you are! So when you see her next, don't go all icy and proud and refuse to justify yourself spin her a story about Sticky Stichy even better than the one he' s spinning about you Half-intrigued, half-skeptical, he stared at her. "Go on, she'd never be stupid enough to fall for it," he said. "Oh, darling Lucius! When you want, you can make any woman fall for any line you care to toss them. Try it! Just this once? For my sake?" wheedled Nicopolis. "No. I'd end up the fool, Nicky." "You wouldn't, you know," Nicopolis persevered. "There isn't enough money in the world to make me grovel to the likes of Clitumna!" "She doesn't have all the money in the world, but she does have more than enough to see you into the Senate," whispered the temptress beguilingly. "No! You're wrong, you really are. There's this house, admittedly, but she spends every penny she gets and what she doesn't spend, Sticky Stichy does." "Not so. Why do you think her bankers hang on her every word as if she were Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi? She's got a very tidy fortune invested with them, and she doesn't spend half of her income. Besides which, give Sticky Stichy his due, he's not short of a sestertius either. As long as his late father's accountant and manager are capable of working, that business of Stichy's will continue to do very nicely." Sulla sat up with a jerk, loosening the folds of toga. "Nicky, you wouldn't spin me a tale, would you?" "I would, but not about this," she said, threading her needle with purple wool intertwined with gold bullion. "She'll live to be a hundred," he said then, subsiding onto the couch and handing back the bowl of nuts to Bithy, no longer hungry. "I agree, she might live to be a hundred," said Nicopolis, plunging her needle into the tapestry and drawing her glittering thread through very, very carefully. Her big dark eyes surveyed Sulla tranquilly. "But then again, she may not. Hers isn't a long-lived family, you know." There were noises outside; Lucius Gavius Stichus was evidently taking his leave of his Aunt Clitumna. Sulla stood up, let the servant girl slip backless Greek slippers onto his feet. The massive length and breadth of the toga slumped to the floor, but he seemed not to notice. "All right, Nicky, just this once I'll try it," he said, and grinned. "Wish me luck!" But before she could, he was gone.