Fortune's Favorites

by Colleen McCullough

  Within moments Lucius Tuccius was there, and Metrobius, and a white-faced Valeria. Sulla lay in terrible straits still vomiting blood while his lover held his head and his wife crouched in a fever of trembling, not knowing what to do. A barked command from Tuccius and servants brought armloads of towels, eyes distended as they took in the condition of the room and the worse condition of their master, choking and retching, trying to speak, both hands fastened like a vise upon Metrobius's blood-covered arm.

  Forgotten, Quintus Granius stayed no longer. While the Sullani huddled terrified and their captain tried to get some spirit into them, the banker from Puteoli walked out of the room, out of the house, down the path to where his horse still stood. He mounted, turned its head, and rode away.

  Much time went by before Sulla ceased his awful activity, before he could be lifted from the floor and carried, a surprisingly light weight, away from the blood-ruined room in the arms of Metrobius. The Sullani fled too, leaving the shaken servants to make order out of a dreadful chaos.

  The worst of it, Sulla found-for he was quite conscious and aware of what was happening-was that the blood kept trying to choke him; it welled up his gullet constantly, even when he was not retching. Appalling! Terrifying! In a frenzy of fear and helplessness he clung to Metrobius as to a chunk of cork in the midst of the sea, his eyes staring up into that dark beloved face with desperate intensity and so much anguished appeal, all he had left to communicate with while the tide of blood kept on rising out of him. On the periphery of his vision he could see Valeria's white frightened skin in which the blue of her eyes was so vivid it was startling, and the set features of his doctor.

  Is this dying? he asked himself, and knew that it was. But I don't want to die this way! Not spewing and airless, soiled and incapable of disciplining my unruly body to get the business over and done with in admirable control and a decent meed of Roman dignity. I was the uncrowned King of Rome. I was crowned with the grass of Nola. I was the greatest man between the Rivers of Ocean and Indus. Let my dying be worthy of all these things! Let it not be a nightmare of blood, speechlessness, fear!

  He thought of Julilla, who had died alone in a welter of blood. And of Nicopolis, who had died with less blood but more agony. And of Clitumna, who had died with broken neck and broken bones. Metellus Numidicus, scarlet in the face and choking-I did not know how awful that is! Dalmatica, crying out his name in Juno Sospita. His son, the light of his life, Julilla's boy who had meant more to him than anyone else ever, ever, ever... He too had died an airless death.

  I am afraid. So afraid! I never thought I would be. It is inevitable, it cannot be avoided, it is over soon enough, and I will never see or hear or feel or think again. I will be no one. Nothing. There is no pain in that fate. It is the fate of a dreamless ignorance. It is eternal sleep. I, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who was the uncrowned King of Rome yet crowned with the grass of Nola, will cease to be except in the minds of men. For that is the only immortality, to be remembered in the world of the living. I had almost finished my memoirs. Only one more little book left to write. More than enough for future historians to judge me. And more than enough to kill Gaius Marius for all of time. He did not live to write his memoirs. I did. So I will win. I have won! And of all my victories, victory over Gaius Marius means the most to me.

  For perhaps an hour the bleeding continued remorselessly, made Sulla suffer horribly; but then it went away, and he could rest more easily. Consciousness clung, he was able to look upon Metrobius and Valeria and Lucius Tuccius with a clarity of vision he had not enjoyed in many moons, as if at the last this greatest of senses was given back to him to mirror his own going in the faces he knew best. He managed to speak.

  "My will. Send for Lucullus, he must read it after I am dead. He is my executor and the guardian of my children."

  "I have already sent for him, Lucius Cornelius," said the Greek actor softly.

  "Have I given you enough, Metrobius?"

  "Always, Lucius Cornelius."

  "I do not know what love is. Aurelia used to say that I knew it but did not perceive my knowledge. I am not so sure. I dreamed the other night of Julilla and our son. He came to me and begged me to join his mother. I should have known then. I didn't. I just wept. Him, I did love. More than I loved myself. Oh, how I have missed him!"

  "That is about to be healed, dear Lucius Cornelius."

  "One reason to look forward to death, then."

  "Is there anything you want?"

  "Only peace. A sense of... Fulfillment."

  "You are fulfilled."

  "My body."

  "Your body, Lucius Cornelius?"

  "The Cornelians are inhumed. But not me, Metrobius. It is in my will, but you must assure Lucullus I mean it. If my body is laid in a tomb, some speck of Gaius Marius's ashes might come and rest upon it. I threw them away. I ought not to have done that. Who knows where they lurk, waiting to defile me? They went floating down the Anio, I saw them smother the eddies like powdered cobwebs. But a wind came, and the unwetted bits on top flew away. So I cannot be sure. I must be burned. You will tell Lucullus that I meant it, that I must be burned and my ashes gathered beneath a tight canopy to shut out the air, and then sealed with wax inside a jar where Gaius Marius cannot get at them. I will be the only Cornelian to be burned."

  "It will be done, I promise."

  "Burn me, Metrobius! Make Lucullus burn me!"

  "I will, Lucius Cornelius. I will."

  "I wish I knew what love was!"

  "But you do, of course you do! Love made you deny your nature and give yourself to Rome."

  "Is that love? It cannot be. Dry as dust. Dry as my ashes. The only Cornelian to be burned, not buried."

  The engorged, ruptured blood vessels at the bottom of his gullet had not done with bleeding; a fresh spate of vomiting gore assailed Sulla soon after, and lasted for many hours with little let. He was sinking, having lost over half his life-force, and the lucid intervals within his mind dwindled. Over and over when he was able he begged Metrobius to make sure no atom of Gaius Marius could ever touch his own remains, and then would ask what love was, and why he didn't know it.

  Lucullus arrived in time to see him die, though no speech had Sulla left, nor even any awareness. The strange bleached eyes with the outer ring of darkness and the black, black pupils had quite lost their usual menace, just looked washed out and overcome with weariness. His breathing had become too shallow to detect by all save a mirror held to his lips, and the white skin could look no whiter because of loss of blood than it normally did. But the mulberry-colored scar tissue blazed, the hairless scalp had lost tension and was wrinkled like a wind-buffeted sea, and the mouth lay sagging against the bones of jaw and chin. Then a change came over the eyes; the pupils began to expand, to blot out the irises and join up the outer edges of darkness. Sulla's light went out, the watchers saw it go, and stared in disbelief at the sheen of gold spread across his wide-open eyes.

  Lucius Tuccius leaned over and pushed down the lids and Metrobius put the coins upon them to keep them closed, while Lucullus slid the single denarius inside Sulla's mouth to pay for Charon's boat ride.

  "He died hard," said Lucullus, rigidly controlled.

  Metrobius wept. "Everything came hard to Lucius Cornelius. To have died easily would not have been fitting."

  "I will escort his body to Rome for a State funeral."

  "He would want that. As long as he is cremated."

  "He will be cremated."

  Numbed with grief, Metrobius crept away after that to find Valeria, who had not proven strong enough to wait for the end.

  "It is all over," he said.

  "I did love him," she said, small-voiced. "I know all Rome thought I married him for convenience, to see him dower my family with honors. But he was a great man and he was very good to me. I loved him, Metrobius! I did truly love him!"

  "I believe you," Metrobius said, sat down near her and took her hand, began to stroke it absently.


  "What will you do now?" she asked.

  Roused from his reverie, he looked down at her hand, fine and white and long-fingered. Not unlike Sulla's hand. Well, they were both patrician Romans. He said, "I will go away."

  "After the funeral?"

  "No, I can't attend that. Can you imagine Lucullus's face if I turned up among the chief mourners?"

  "But Lucullus knows what you meant to Lucius Cornelius! He knows! No one better!"

  "This will be a State funeral, Valeria. Nothing can be allowed to diminish its dignity, least of all a Greek actor with a well-used arse." That came out sounding bitter; then Metrobius shrugged. "Frankly, I don't think Lucius Cornelius would like me there. As for Lucullus, he's a great aristocrat. What went on here in Misenum permitted him to indulge some of his own less admirable impulses. He likes to deflower children." The dark face looked suddenly sick. "At least Sulla's vices were the usual ones! He condoned it in Lucullus, but he didn't do it himself."

  "Where are you going?"

  "To Cyrenaica. The golden backwater of the world."

  "When?"

  "Tonight. After Lucullus has started Sulla on his last journey and the house is quiet."

  "How do you get to Cyrenaica?"

  "From Puteoli. It's spring. There will be ships going to Africa, to Hadrumetum. From there I'll hire my own transport."

  "Can you afford to?"

  "Oh, yes. Sulla could leave me nothing in his will, but he gave me more than enough in life. He was odd, you know. A miser except to those he loved. That's the saddest thing of all, that even at the end he doubted his capacity to love." He lifted his gaze from her hand to her face, his eyes shadowing as certain thoughts began to swim in the mind they reflected. "And you, Valeria? What about you?"

  "I must go back to Rome. After the funeral I will return to my brother's house."

  "That," said Metrobius, "may not be a good idea. I have a better one."

  The drowned blue eyes were innocent of guile; she looked at him in genuine bewilderment. "What?"

  "Come to Cyrenaica with me. Have your child and call me its father. Whichever one of us quickened you-Lucullus, Sorex, Roscius or I-makes no difference to me. It has occurred to me that Lucullus was one of the four of us and he knows as well as I do that Sulla could not have been your child's father. I think Rome spells disaster for you, Valeria. Lucullus will denounce you. It is a way of discrediting you. Don't forget that alone among Lucullus's equals in birth, you can indict him for practices his colleagues would condemn."

  "Ye gods!"

  "You must come with me."

  "They wouldn't let me!"

  "They'll never know. I'll inform Lucullus that you're too ill to travel with Sulla's cortege, that I'll send you to Rome before the funeral. Lucullus is too busy at the moment to remember his own frail position, and he doesn't know about your child. So if you are to escape him it must be now, Valeria."

  "You're right. He would indeed denounce me."

  "He might even have you killed."

  "Oh, Metrobius!"

  "Come with me, Valeria. As soon as he's gone you and I will walk out of this house. No one will see us go. Nor will anyone ever find out what happened to you." Metrobius smiled wryly. "After all, I was just Sulla's boy. You, a Valeria Messala, were his wife. Far above me!"

  But she didn't think she was above him at all. Months ago she had fallen in love with him, even though she understood it was not in him to return that love. So she said, "I will come."

  The hand he still held was patted gladly, then placed in her lap. "Good! Stay here for the present. Lucullus must not set eyes on you. Get a few things together, but nothing more than will fit on the back of a pack mule. Make sure you take only dark plain gowns, and that your cloaks have hoods. You must look like my wife, not the wife of Lucius Cornelius Sulla."

  Off he went, leaving Valeria Messala to look at a future vastly different from the one she had contemplated would be hers after Sulla's obsequies were over. Never having understood the threat she posed to Lucullus, she knew she had cause to be very grateful to the actor. To go with Metrobius might mean the pain of seeing him love men when she longed for him to love her; but he would regard the child as his own, and she could offer him a family life he might in time come to appreciate more than the tenuous affairs he had enjoyed with men other than Sulla. Yes, better that by far than the agony of never seeing him again! Or the finality of death. Without, she had thought until now, good reason, she had feared the cold and haughty Lucullus. Rightly so.

  Rising, she began to sort through her many chests of rich garments, choosing the plainest and darkest things. Of money she had none, but her jewels were glorious. Apparently Metrobius had plenty of money, so the jewels could be her dowry. A hedge against hard times in the future. Cyrenaica! The golden backwater of the world. It sounded wonderful.

  Sulla's funeral reduced his triumph to utter insignificance. Two hundred and ten litters loaded down to creaking point with myrrh, frankincense, cinnamon, balsam, nard and other aromatics-the gift of Rome's women-were carried by black-garbed bearers. And because Sulla's corpse was so shrunken and mummified by loss of blood that it could not be displayed, a group of sculptors had set to work and fashioned out of cinnamon and frankincense an effigy of Sulla sitting on his bier, preceded by a lictor made from the same spices. There were floats depicting every aspect of his life except the first thirty-three disreputable years and the last few disreputable months. There he was before the walls of Nola receiving his Grass Crown from the hands of a centurion; there he was standing sternly over a cowering King Mithridates making sure the Treaty of Dardanus was signed; there he was winning battles, legislating laws, capturing Jugurtha, executing the Carboan prisoners after the Colline Gate. A special vehicle displayed the more than two thousand chaplets and wreaths made from pure gold which had been given to him by towns and tribes and kings and countries everywhere. His ancestors rode, clad in black, in black-and-gilt chariots drawn by splendid black horses, and his chubby little five-year-old twins Faustus and Fausta walked amid the chief mourners.

  The day was suffocating and overcast, the air exuded unshed rain. But the biggest funeral procession Rome had ever seen got under way from the house overlooking the Circus Maximus, wended its way down through the Velabrum to the Forum Romanum, where Lucullus-a powerful and famous speaker-gave the eulogy from the top of the rostra, standing alongside the cunning bier on which the frankincense and cinnamon Sulla sat upright behind his spicy lictor and the horrible wizened old corpse lay below in a special compartment. For the second time in three years Rome wept to see his twins deprived of a parent, and broke into applause when Lucullus told Rome that he was the children's guardian, and would never see them want. Sentiment clouded every watering eye; had it not, Rome would have perceived that Faustus and Fausta were now old enough to reveal that in physique and faces and coloring they were going to take after their maternal great-uncle, the awesome but unhandsome Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus. Whom their father had called Piggle-wiggle. And murdered in a fit of rage after Aurelia had repudiated him.

  As if under the spell of some enchantment, the rain held off as the procession got under way again, this time up the Clivus Argentarius, through the Fontinalis Gate beyond which lay the mansion which had once belonged to Gaius Marius, and down to the Campus Martius. There Sulla's tomb already waited in sumptuous isolation on the Via Lata adjacent to the ground on which met the Centuriate Assembly. At the ninth hour of daylight the bier was deposited on top of the huge, well-ventilated pyre, its kindling and logs interspersed with the contents of those two hundred and ten litters of spices. Never would Sulla smell sweeter than when, according to his wishes, his mortal remains burned.

  Just as the torches licked at the kindling all around the base of the pyre, a huge wind arose; the miniature mountain went up with a roar, and blazed so fiercely the mourners gathered around it had to move away, shielding their faces. Then as the fire died down it began to rain at last, a
solid downpour which quenched and cooled the coals so quickly that Sulla's ashes were collected a few short moments after the holocaust. Into an exquisite alabaster jar ornamented with gold and gems all that was left of Sulla went; Lucullus dispensed with the canopy Sulla had asked for to shelter his remains from contamination by a stray granule of Gaius Marius, for the rain continued unabated, and no stray granules of any dust floated on the air.

  The jar was deposited carefully inside the tomb, built and masoned and sculpted within four days out of multicolored marbles, round in shape and supported by fluted columns crowned with the new kind of capital Sulla had brought back from Corinth and had made so popular-delicate sprays of acanthus leaves. His name and titles and deeds were carved upon a panel facing the road, and beneath them was his simple epitaph. He had composed it himself, and it said:

  NO BETTER FRIEND • NO WORSE ENEMY

  "Well, I'm very glad that's over," said Lucullus to his brother as they trudged home through the tempest, soaked to their skins and shivering with cold.

  He was a worried man: Valeria Messala had not arrived in Rome. Her brother, Rufus, her cousins Niger and Metellus Nepos, and her great-aunt the retired Vestal were all beginning to ask agitated questions; Lucullus had been obliged to inform them that he had sent to Misenum for her, only to be told by an exhausted messenger on a winded horse that she had disappeared.

  Almost a month went by before Lucullus called off the now frantic search, which had included a careful combing of the shore for some miles north and south of the villa, and of every wood and grove between Neapolis and Sinuessa. Sulla's last wife had vanished. And so had her jewels.

  "Robbed and murdered," said Varro Lucullus.

  His brother (who kept some things even from this beloved person) made no answer. His luck, he told himself, bade fair to be as good as Sulla's, for he had not got as far as the day of the funeral before he realized how dangerous Valeria Messala might be. She knew too much about him, whereas he knew virtually nothing about her. He would have had to kill her. How providential therefore that someone had done it for him! Fortune favored him.