In the star-filled night I stand at Servilia’s atrium pool. The glow of moon and stars illuminates my shadow on the water, but not its features. Who is this gawking, overgrown thing that the palpable pressure between his legs and between his ears, like a pair of horses, hurtles him forward? Cornelia says he’s just a man, and should act like a man. Servilia’s not so sure. Servilia thinks he may be a star, a brilliant orb that illumines the world. He parts Servilia’s robe as he parted Cornelia’s, and what does he see? Not Cornelia’s virginal bush—Servilia was pregnant when they killed her husband—but the clipped and perfumed shrub of drive and ambition.
We see each other as history.
“You’re thinking,” she says, suddenly there by the pool, a shadow in a long white shift. So did goddesses once appear before men. But why does she think I’m special?
In her room we light the lamps. Wrinkles radiate from her eye corners and faint age lines run down her neck. But her body is smooth and firm, her breasts alert, aggressive, her nipples the color of blood.
“Don’t look at me. Don’t evaluate me.”
“Turn around.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You make me feel vulnerable.”
“I want to see the map of Italy on your back.”
She turns and I trace it, from shoulders down to the coccyx, lower Gaul to Mediolanum, to Brindusium and Rhegium—all mine, not in the sense of ownership, but of spirit and idea.
She turns around and presents her front, her lips in a close-mouthed smile. I hover and look down at myself, ready to penetrate, ready to seek. We connect, lock, that perfumed shrub is the gateway to a sweet, netherworld where she clings to me desperately.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “Don’t worry.”
Apollo is just raising his whip as my litter hustles through the cool, cluttering streets—the Flamen is forbidden to ride a horse within the city walls. My curtain stays open. A metalsmith’s hammer rings through the streets. Butchers are already at slaughter and animal squeals announce the city’s hunger. I weave around the carts and food stalls. A garbage-eating dog eyes me. What enemy is this?
The Marians are preparing for Sulla’s return. He’s defeated Mithridates in Asia—for the time being—but placed our name in infamy by sacking Piraeus and burning the Acropolis at Athens. Now he’s back to retake the consulship, joined by Pompey and Crassus. Weary with the burden of his own violence, Marius lies down and dies. His son, Marius the Younger, will defend the Populars outside the city walls.
Servilia says Young Marius will lose and that I should leave the city.
“This isn’t your time,” she says. “Leave here as soon as you can.”
Her faith in me is a secret treasure.
The beach smells of hollow shellfish and salty weed. Snails and mollusks drift into the tide pools. A wall of haze covers the mainland, and above it Apollo whips his horses into a dead run. He’s higher on the horizon now, and the blinding sphere, approaching its spring arc, finally warms me.
Like a woman being loved, I lie on the sand and take in the sun. Close my eyes and spread my arms and legs, admit the energy of gods and ancestors to the center of my being, admit my family line to Aeneas, who passed here on the way to Italy one thousand years ago.
A thousand years of tide on the stones, of dead and desiccated shellfish, a thousand years of sea swells, a thousand years when the Venus-born Trojan fought his way through the Greek line with Father Anchises on his back, and then set sail for the place whose name he didn’t know, that peninsula thrust into the center of Our Sea. Above and around him the gods raged and bickered, played with his winds, wrecked his ships, knocked him down, but he always stood back up. The gods rewarded his faith and persistence. They gave him a ship, a breeze, a bladder of water, just enough, all to the rhythms of the very sea before me, all to this backdrop to life, rising and falling.
The gods, the sea, one thousand years ago when the Greeks launched their ships and flew to Troy like a flight of cormorants. It could have been yesterday.
I sit up, rubbing the dreams from my eyes. The day will come when hard life replaces these easy dreams. And this young man half-naked on the sand, chin resting on his drawn-up knees, will have to keep his word.
Three blasts from the watch and Cutter’s men launch their galleys, pushing them down the beach and into the harbor, the oarsmen pulling hard even as the stragglers high-step through the surf and clamber aboard. All oars working now, Cutter’s little fleet shoots through the harbor mouth, using no sails, for the day is windless, and the sea like polished bronze.
Cutter remains behind and invites me to the tower, pointing to a trader in the shipping lane, pulling its way north. It rides low in the water, as ours did. From our perch we can hear the grunts and curses of its oarsmen, who are visible through portholes in the ship’s sides.
Cutter leans on the parapet, shading his eyes with his good hand. His galleys fly at the target like birds.
“Even if you catch it,” I say.
“Yes?”
“You’ll pay in the end.”
“You and your stupid law.”
“It’s more than the law.”
“What is it, then?”
“A way of life, a way of reason.”
He turns to me with his hands still cupped over his eyes. The tower is made of hot, radiant white stones.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“You have much to learn.”
“So do you.”
The trader changes direction and a second bank of oars now reaches into the water. To the rhythm-keeper’s now-rapid drumming the banks of oars rise and fall. A voice cries out and the crew unfurls a great square mainsail. It begins to roll and flap before they secure its corners, then the ship creaks with the strain and its prow digs into the sea, cutting like a plow. A wind just in time! The wind god punches the sail, and the ship surges forward, outdistancing Cutter’s galleys.
“This is a sign that you’re going to lose. From now on you’re going to lose everything.”
Servilia knows the Sullans will kill me. She takes me into the arms room and shows me old-style curved swords, helmets trimmed with eagle feathers, ancient javelins, their heads bent and rusting, and attached to the shafts with loose wooden pegs. From the wall she takes down old circular shields with insignias of the famous legions—Larks, Horsemen, Lightning Throwers. She lifts up an antique bow strung with her grandmother’s hair and explains how the women gave their hair for bowstrings when the Gauls took the city generations ago.
“Do you show me these weapons to inspire me? And to what?”
“To what you were, and what you will be.”
I place the bow around her neck and pull her in. When she speaks to me that way my heart expands and presses against my throat.
I’m about to embrace her when the door opens.
“Mother?”
It’s Marcus, her son, squeezing sleep out of his eyes with the backs of his hands.
“Do you want a story?” I ask.
He pulls me into his room, which contains the usual collection of toys, a leather ball, some wooden legionary weapons which all boys own, a desk with tablets, writing tools and several books.
Marcus leaps into bed and shuts his eyes. I cover him up and sit beside him.
“Tell me,” he says. “Tell me now.”
“If you promise to shut your eyes and go right to sleep after it.”
He takes my hand. “I promise, now recite.”
I begin from memory:
And as for Hector, before the Skaean gates
tragic destiny pinned him cold, that fatal and
irreversible verdict of the Gods which no mortal
can oppose, for it is like the tide….
Marcus shuts his eyes during the poem, and the apprehension on his face gradually turns to sadness. His eyelids begin to flutter.
“It wasn’t fair,” he says when the poem i
s finished, as the tears come. “Hector was the braver warrior.”
“Yes, but Hector didn’t have the luck. Remember that.”
“That’s what you always say.”
I put my palm to his forehead and he holds it there. “Luck means having the gods on your side, no more than that.”
“And how does that happen?”
“By winning them over.”
Moonlight seeps through the shutters and prints a pattern of brilliant lines on the nearby furniture. I lie down and shiver. Servilia piles on the blankets and gets in with me.
Her hand between my legs kneads me, milks me. “I don’t want to lose you, but you can’t stay here. You must leave the city.”
“You won’t lose me.”
She pledges herself to me and the flow of her tears on my face tastes like sweet sea water. Yet coupled with this love is the thorn-prick of fear. My blood runs hot and cold. From the streets I hear the commands of officers, soldiers in hobnailed boots in fast march, the neigh of horses, the explosive clatter of carts. The Marians are forming. They will defend at the city gates.
This may be our last time, and Servilia holds me to it. At your service, Lady. Let me die now, let them come from behind and kill me. Let life be brief and passionate.
Cutter arrives at my door. He bows slightly from the waist, without his usual insulting exaggeration. I look him over, the way he did to me on the trader, up, down, and condescending. He’s wearing a leather tool belt and an old tunic smeared with black pitch. He looks up with his ironic grin, and one of his little black eyes is moving around, the other fixed.
“Come,” he says, beckoning with the fingers of his good hand. “I want to show you something.”
“What is it?”
“The new ship. I want to show you what we’re doing.”
Together we walk to the beach, where the men are working on the trireme. He’s about to put his good hand on mine as a gesture of friendship, but stops the gesture midway. The hand is sticky with pitch and I’ve already recoiled.
“We’re stuck here together,” he says. “And we might as well become friends.”
“At least until the ransom arrives.”
“At least. We should treat each other as equals.”
“I think you have something else in mind.”
“Which is?”
“Something you want to prove, something you’ll never stop wanting to prove.”
“And what is that, Lord?”
“That you’re unpredictable. That I’ll never outwit you.”
Laughing, he leads me down to the beach where his men have put scaffolding around the trireme. They’re smearing pitch over the hull, for caulking and camouflage. He explains that after the pitch has been applied, the ship will go to Miletus, where carpenters will install an assault ramp, and a small castle to house a catapult.
“With this galley I can fight or run, attack or retreat. It was a great find, Lord.”
“And you’ll improve it with my money. You’ll use my money against my own kind.”
He rolls his eyes. “Money is like rain and the sea. It rises and falls. And I’m sure you feel the same way, otherwise you wouldn’t have agreed to a generous ransom.”
“You know nothing about what I think.”
He sighs and looks upward, as if asking the gods for patience. “You’re still a boy, despite all your outward sophistication, all the stories we hear about you.” He wiggles the fingers of his good hand in a sign of falling rain. “Is the source of my money any different from yours? Compared to your race what I’ve done is a grain of sand to all of this beach.”
“How long have you been on this island?” I ask.
“Why? Do you own it? Do you own it the way you own Greece, or Sicily?”
“We own nothing. Our law unites …”
“Your law is rape and murder. Your law sucks people dry. Your people simply assume and take. This island, this sea, is part of Cilicia, part of Asia. Now you take it and tax it. You tax the farmers and fisherman and tradesmen. You tax each house and double it for every additional door. You’re the pirate, not me.”
He spits on the ram’s head, shines it on his tunic, and holds it in front of my face.
“Some day I’ll tell you how this happened.”
“Why?”
“To give you a picture, of yourself.”
With great slaughter, Sulla defeats the Marians outside the city walls. I hide at Servilia’s until the battle is over, then head for the Colline Gate disguised as a tradesman. Revenge is already under way. Execution squads comb the Aventine, taking over the Marian villas—including mine—murdering any Marian supporters they find, often dragging them out of their homes and cutting them to pieces in front of their families. Many of the dead aren’t Marians at all, but personal enemies of the Sullans. The victims’ heads are stuck on pikes and paraded through the city, or thrown against the walls and crushed under the soldiers’ boots.
The air reeks of burnt wood and fabric—furniture, curtains, pillow stuffing. Outside the gate the smell changes, to human flesh. Legionaries’ bodies are stacked like logs and Sulla’s men are burning them in pits as fast as slaves can supply fuel. Severed heads on javelin points line the road.
Defeated in battle, young Marius flees to Praeneste with the remnants of his army. There Sulla besieges him, catapulting his enemies’ heads over the walls. This terrifies the populace, and without their support, Young Marius can’t hold on. He tries to escape through the town sewer, but finding Sulla’s troops guarding the exit, falls on his sword.
Sulla also publishes an enemies list, with my name on it.
This descendent of Venus broods on the swells while cormorants guard the rock tops, wings spread to dry their feathers. What can these black birds offer me? Either bad luck or reality. I pace on the sand, waiting, waiting, drying my own feathers. My life has been one retreat after another, either open flight or calculated absence. And if I survive the Sullans, who are still in power, should I wait my turn like any other soldier in the whorehouse of this world? Or take my luck on the tide? I could start here, on this island. If only I felt Servilia’s breath in my ear.
Not before changing the face of the earth. Could this be? She’s seen the signs. My severe fevers, in which I ramble on about the gods, my “sacred” fits, in which rolled muslin is forced between my teeth to prevent me from swallowing my tongue. She reads special destiny in my restlessness, my disdain for food, and the flight of doves that circles her villa when I depart all sing my name.
She sets me completely on fire.
After Sulla’s victory we move about the countryside in a cart loaded with wine casks, one of them empty. This is my hiding place at the checkpoints.
Sulla decorates the road markers with severed heads. They’re powdered with dust by now, the eyes pecked out by birds. These poor faces are a final punctuation to ideas and causes. But a face without life is not exactly lifeless, for a man’s last emotion shines through an ostensible neutrality. You see at first a mask, blank and transparent. This is death’s last joke. Stare at a dead man’s face and you soon penetrate the mask to his emotion at the moment of death.
At one of the checkpoints an officer taps the casks and finds mine hollow. He calls me out, then shows me a cart full of bloody sacks and opens one up. The heads inside could well be melons if not for the hair, and the fetid smell. I see the blood-drained face of a young man with vacant blue eyes and a shock of golden ringlets.
“Pretty, isn’t he,” says the captain. “They caught him coming out of a barber stall.” He ties the sack shut, then turns to me, drawing himself up.
I scratch a figure in a wax tablet and show it. He shakes his head. I scratch another, double the amount. He sniffles, rubs his hands together, looks back at his men and says, “If we were alone.” I double that figure. He says to me, “My head would be in that sack if I let you go.”
They bring me back to the city. Outside in the forum and under a vine arbor
fittingly hung with rotting grapes, Sulla holds audience. They say he has skin like oatmeal. This is an understatement. His face is an eruption of blemishes, a ravage of inflamed, flaking and scrofulous hide. Such a face would drive anyone to murder, out of jealousy for all mankind. He looks at me with eyes like melted wax. He’s already dead, already a blank-eyed statue.
“Say hello to your cousin,” he says, smiling.
“What cousin?”
He points to a pedestal not twenty paces away, upon which the head of Marius the Younger has been mounted—above the following, inscribed large:
Learn to row before you try to steer.
Aristophanes
This is the great man’s humor. The last time I saw Young Marius he was outside the senate with six or eight henchmen, bullying a senator. He kept his index finger in the poor man’s face. He was taller than his father, more handsome, and a greater bully as well. He had spaces between his uneven teeth so you couldn’t tell whether he was angry or smiling. He looks no different in death than he did in life, except, perhaps, more peaceful, and released from his father’s burden.
A sword on Sulla’s table holds down some parchments. He shuffles them as if looking for something.
“Why did you flee the city?”
I let him peruse me—red boots, purple cloak, hair trimmed and perfumed, every beard hair plucked so I’ll never need to shave again. The process was painful, but this might amuse our blood-lusted Sulla, for he writes poetry, enjoys theater, and is open to any piggish amusement, especially with young boys.
“Why did you flee after the battle?”
“Who wouldn’t?”
Saying, “I know you better than you think,” he picks up the sword and points it at my groin.
“Servilia,” he says, sighting along the blade and parting my cloak at penis level.
Cutter's Island Page 5
