Read Online Fortune's Favorites by Colleen McCullough - Free Book Online Page B

Sulla.
    Visions of it unrolled before his sightless dreaming eyes like a moving pageant-two godlike men with hair of flame and faces both strong and beautiful uncoiled from their saddles with the grace and power of giant cats and walked with measured stately steps toward each other down the middle of an empty road, its sides thronged with every traveler and every last inhabitant of the countryside, an army behind each of these magnificent men, and every pair of eyes riveted upon them. Zeus striding to meet Jupiter. Ares striding to meet Mars. Hercules striding to meet Milo. Achilles striding to meet Hector. Yes, it would be hymned down the ages so loudly that it would put Aeneas and Turnus to shame! The first encounter between the two colossi of this world, the two suns in its sky-and while the setting sun was still hot and still strong, its course was nearing an end. Ah! But the rising sun! Hot and strong already, yet with all the soaring vault before it in which to grow ever hotter, ever stronger. Thought Pompey exultantly, Sulla's sun is westering! Whereas mine is barely above the eastern horizon.
    He sent Varro ahead to present his compliments to Sulla and to give Sulla an account of his progress from Auximum, the tally of those he had killed, the names of the generals he had defeated. And to ask that Sulla himself venture down the road to meet him so that everyone could witness his coming in peace to offer himself and his troops to the greatest man of this age. He didn't ask Varro to add, “or of any other age” - that he was not prepared to admit, even in a flowery greeting.
    Every detail of this meeting had been fantasized a thousand times, even down to what Pompey felt he ought to wear. In the first few hundred passes he had seen himself clad from head to foot in gold plate; then doubt began to gnaw, and he decided golden armor was too ostentatious, might be labeled crass. So for the next few hundred passes he saw himself clad in a plain white toga, shorn of all military connotations and with the narrow purple stripe of the knight slicing down the right shoulder of his tunic; then doubt gnawed again, and he worried that the white toga would merge into the white horse to produce an amorphous blob. The final few hundred passes saw him in the silver armor his father had presented to him after the siege of Asculum Picentum had concluded; doubt did not gnaw at all, so he liked that image of self best.
    Yet when his groom assisted him into the saddle of his big white Public Horse, Gnaeus Pompeius (Magnus) was wearing the very plainest of steel cuirasses, the leather straps of his kilt were unadorned by bosses or fringes, and the helmet on his head was standard issue to the ranks. It was his horse he bedizened, for he was a knight of the eighteen original centuries of the First Class, and his family had held the Public Horse for generations. So the horse wore every conceivable knightly trapping of silver buttons and medallions, silver-encrusted scarlet leather harness, an embroidered blanket beneath a wrought and ornamented saddle, a clinking medley of silver pendants. He looked, Pompey congratulated himself as he set off down the middle of the empty road with his army in rank and file behind him, like a genuine no-nonsense soldier-a workman, a professional. Let the horse proclaim his glory!
    Beneventum lay on the far side of the Calor River, where the Via Appia made junction with the Via Minucia from coastal Apulia and Calabria. The sun was directly overhead when Pompey and his legions came over the brow of a slight hill and looked down to the Calor crossing. And there on this side of it, waiting in the middle of the road upon an unutterably weary mule, was Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Attended only by Varro. The local populace!-where were they? Where were Sulla's legates, his troops? Where the travelers?
    Some instinct made Pompey turn his head and bark to the standard-bearer of his leading legion that the soldiers would halt,