The Grass Crown by Colleen McCullough Read Free Book Online Page B

Didius. What do you think?”
    “I think it’s the best thing Lucius Cornelius can do,” said Marius calmly. “Quintus Sertorius is standing for election as a tribune of the soldiers, so I daresay he’ll go to Spain as well.”
    “You don’t sound very surprised,” said Sulla.
    “I’m not. The news about Spain will be general knowledge tomorrow anyway. There’s a meeting of the Senate called for the temple of Bellona. And we’ll give Titus Didius the war against the Celtiberians,” said Marius. “He’s a good man. A sound soldier and a general of some talent, I think. Especially when he’s up against Gauls of one description or another. Yes, Lucius Cornelius, it will do you more good in the elections to go to Spain as a legate than to rattle all over Anatolia with a privatus.”

The Grass Crown
    3
    The privatus left for Tarentum and the packet to Patrae the following week, a little confused and disorientated at first because he took his wife and son with him, and this was a mode of travel he had never before experienced. The soldier barked orders at his noncombatants and traveled as lightly as he could as quickly as he could. But wives, as Gaius Marius discovered, had other ideas. Julia had elected to take half the household with them, including a cook who specialized in children’s food, and Young Marius’s pedagogue, and a girl who performed miracles with Julia’s hair. All of Young Marius’s toys had been packed, his schoolbooks and the pedagogue’s private library, clothes for every occasion, and items Julia feared she would not be able to get outside Rome.
    “The three of us have more baggage and attendants than the King of the Parthians moving from Seleuceia-on-Tigris to Ecbatana for the summer,” Marius growled after three days on the Via Latina saw them no further along than Anagnia.
    However, he put up with it until some three weeks later they arrived in Venusia on the Via Appia, prostrated by the heat and unable to find an inn large enough to accommodate all their servants and baggage.
    “I’ll have an end to it!” roared Marius after the less needed servants and baggage had been sent to another hostelry, and he and Julia were as alone as a busy posting-house on the Via Appia permitted. “Either you streamline your operation, Julia, or you and Young Marius can go back to Cumae, spend the summer there. We are not going to be in uncivilized parts for months to come, so there’s no need for half this clutter! And no need for so many people! A cook for Young Marius! I ask you!”
    Julia was hot, exhausted, and close to tears; the wonderful holiday was a nightmare from which she could not awaken. Upon hearing the ultimatum, her first instinct was to seize upon the chance to go back to Cumae; then she thought about the years during which she would not see Marius, the years during which he would not see his son. And the possibility that, somewhere unsafe and strange, he might suffer another stroke.
    “Gaius Marius, I have never traveled before, except to our villas at Cumae and Arpinum. And when Young Marius and I go to Cumae or Arpinum, we go in the same state as we are now. I see your point. And I wish I could oblige you.” She put her head on her hand, furtively brushed at a tear. “The trouble is, I do not have the faintest idea how to go about it.”
    Never had Marius thought to hear his wife admit something was beyond her! Understanding how hard it was for her to say it, he gathered her into a hug, and kissed the top of her head. “Never mind, I’ll do it,” he said. “But if I do, there’s one thing I shall have to insist upon.”
    “Anything, Gaius Marius, anything!”
    “Whatever you find you need but I’ve thrown out, whomever you find you need but I’ve sent home, not a word, Julia! Not—one—word. Understood?”
    Sighing with pleasure and squeezing him hard, Julia closed her eyes. “Understood,” she said.
    After that they got along speedily and well, with, as Julia