B007IIXYQY EBOK (38 page)

He stopped abruptly as if he softly struck some unseen barrier. A shuddery breath escaped from him.

Juno have mercy, it is too soon—let him finish his words!

The lamp flame did a frightful, twisting dance, as though making way for the passing of his father’s shade. Then it died—the oil that fed it had run dry—and Marcus sat in darkness. He did not move, though he knew Diocles and the surgeon waited outside; he was not yet prepared to endure the sounds of the household’s wailing.

“Forgive you what?” he spoke aloud to the corpse. “That you mocked my pursuit of learning and thought it excess? Think no more on it, it was your nature, as it is the nature of horses to run. Why is it always those who need no forgiveness who in the end beg it? It is the ones who drove you to this death that I forever refuse to forgive.

“A lifetime of faithfulness, and this is your reward. If I live, I won’t serve out of duty, as you did. Perhaps duty, that is where we went off course. If we serve it should be for—for what? For love, love for what might be….”

In one swift moment he had the brutal thought his father was soulless matter, and nothing now existed of him anywhere. The existence of the spirit was a hoax perpetrated by priests to encourage offerings at the temples.

But then he sensed pricked, listening ears, a deft, questing mind, attentive, benevolent as it closed about him in the dark.

To his father’s ghost he said, “I will give back to you what you gave me: the world.
That is what you gave me, no less. I will see that it dignifies you and speaks your name with reverence. You want an august memory. I will go and get it for you. And not from duty—that is a mule’s harness—but from love.” He imagined he felt his father’s spirit flinch.

Why could he not have clung to life a little longer to hear that? Marcus thought. But then, he realized, I would not have said it; I needed the dark, safe distance of death.

The corpse was not cold before a detachment of Praetorian Guards was dispatched to the house; two forced their way in to verify that Marcus Julianus the Elder was dead. When the suicide was reported to Nero, he at once charged Marcus Julianus the Younger with treason, claiming he abetted the conspiracy, then tossed in a charge of “filial impiety” because Marcus Julianus had not followed his father into death.

At dawn the following day Marcus sent a message to the family of the maid Junilla, offering to release her from the betrothal. Junilla had been promised to him almost a decade ago when she was scarcely out of her mother’s arms; he knew even if he survived he would be a poor match for a maid of such ancient lineage—the pall of disgrace would never be completely dispelled from his family.

And within the hour Marcus received an odd note in reply, written in the Emperor’s childish hand and delivered by Nero’s newly made wife, the eunuch Sporus: The wedding to Junilla was to be celebrated as planned, and at once; his trial date was to be moved back to make sufficient time for the young bride’s preparations.
Why, in the name of Nemesis?
It made sense, Marcus supposed, to a madman. Wedding, trial, execution—what perverse amusement did Nero mean to derive from this mockery of the passages of life?

And I wonder this about a man said to have set fire to half the city just to watch it burn.

As his father’s embalmed body was carried through the city, groups of citizens shouted: “The traitor is dead!” and mocked the elder Julianus’ writings, attaching them to poles and dragging them through mud. Marcus, as he walked behind the mourners, bearing the family’s ancestral masks, looked on in silent wrath as mud struck the pallbearers, the corpse itself. His father had so wanted to be loved by them.
Before the gods, I must speak his defense!

The imperial government treated Marcus Julianus the Elder as if he had been condemned in fact, in spite of his suicide: The family estates scattered over five provinces were seized; Marcus Julianus, his son, was left with the great-house and its library. Arria, his aunt, fared less well: She was even stripped of her house because one of Nero’s concubines fancied it; she and her terrified children were forced to take refuge with Marcus Julianus in the mansion on the Esquiline.

When mid-month came and the time of the wedding drew close, one day at dawn as Marcus Julianus was conducting the morning audience, a stranger appeared, disguised as one of the family clients—those poor free citizens attached to every great-house who gathered at their patron’s door at first light to give a formal salutation and a promise of small services in exchange for money gifts. The interloper, concealed in a hooded, oil-stained cloak, hung back until the last retainer had departed with his small pouch of silver coins.

“Quickly, state your name,” Julianus said with weary tolerance. The hooded stranger emerged through the entrance hall with long strides full of the bullying arrogance of youth, then paused dramatically before the light-well of the atrium, watching Julianus through the shaft of morning sun slanting down in the space between them.

“We are more testy than usual today, are we not?” With a grand gesture the man threw back the hood of the cloak.

“Domitian. My wretchedness was not complete. Now it is.”

He had not seen Domitian since the young man had come to his house for the last day of the Saturnalia celebrations. Lately, some among Julianus’ acquaintances had began to call Domitian the “peasant crown prince”—for if civil war erupted, he had a more than fair chance of becoming an emperor’s son. His father, Vespasian, whom Nero had sent out to the province of Judaea to quell the Jewish revolt, had more legions under his control than any other legionary commander—and so was in the best position to take the throne by force. In these times Domitian was courted by everyone, and he strained his newfound privileges to the limit, borrowing huge sums of money, seducing women above his station, giving rich banquets, making friends among the Praetorian Guard. That he might
not
one day be within a breath of the highest office on earth rarely seemed to occur to him—he would worry over that one if the time came. Because he was ashamed of his own provincial education and an important man had to affect a command of the arts, he copied Marcus Julianus closely in matters of learning—Domitian’s flawless instincts for such things told him the younger Julianus was the man to imitate—studying with the same teachers, attending the same lectures, even echoing Julianus’s opinions at dinner-party debates.

“Excuse the disguise, but I knew no other way to see you. Best of friends and old school companion, I—”

“Best of friends! You would make a fine auctioneer. The last time you were here I ordered you out.”

“A lapse of taste on your part I’m
willing to forget. Come, we have a common goal, we
should
be friends.”

Marcus Julianus could not contain a faint smile at such audacity. “Caesar and Marcus Antonius had a common goal. It did not make them friends.”

“What you call cruelty,” Domitian said with an impish grin, “I call sport and a good time. Must two men always agree?” Their fight had come about when Domitian, between courses, decided to show off his skill in archery to Marcus’ guests. He ordered one of his attendant slaves to go into the garden and stand next to a tree with fingers outstretched so he could shoot arrows between them. That the terrified slave got off without injury had not lessened Julianus’ anger toward him.

“On some matters, yes, they must.” Julianus’ tone became gentler. “Well, tell me then—how have I become useful to you?”

Encouraged by this barest sign of relenting on Julianus’ part, Domitian approached closer with the sly smile of one preparing to tell an obscene joke in confidence. Domitian’s wine-flushed face had a heavy handsomeness bordering on fleshiness; it put Julianus in mind of a sullen Apollo cast too large. The young man managed somehow to look thoroughly world-weary at seventeen. Those eyes were ever watchful, swift to calculate the relative power of others in a given room—dark, lively eyes marred by a morbid look that easily attracted lovers of both sexes. He would struggle a few more years to keep that heavy-boned body conditioned, Julianus surmised, then give it up. There was a blunted, dull solidity about his head, his shoulders; his was a tall, brooding form giving the sense of a spirit weighted down. He was the sort to retreat to dark places and nurse hurts at leisure, waiting for the moment to rush out and attack while his quarry basks unawares in the sun.

“You have it then. It
was
cruelty. I do not do such things anymore.” Domitian was struggling, but with what? Julianus considered. A genuine impulse to control that playful sadism, or with sincerity fallen into long disuse, or the final refinement of his acting ability?

Best for now to treat it as sincere, Julianus decided. It was one of those moments that would linger in memory—the one time he thought he might have seen a childlike openness in Domitian’s manner, a youthful suppleness of mind.

“It is past then. Let us speak of it no more.” Marcus Julianus rose then and embraced his friend, chiding himself for still holding onto a good measure of distrust.

“First I’ll cement our rekindled friendship with a gift,” Domitian said, smiling, “an offering of choice information. I’ve learned why Nero seems only in a
moderate
hurry to dispose of you—by rights you should be dead already, you know. You know those tiresome literary competitions Nero bores his guests with when the courses are done? Well, an ode
you
wrote last year somehow got put in with the rest, and the cursed thing—truthfully you’ve written better—got chosen as victor over Nero’s, because the judges got confused over who wrote what and—”

“Nemesis! Why was I not told of this?”

“I wasn’t there, nor was anyone loyal to you. Your good friend has razor ears or you wouldn’t be hearing it now. They corrected the mistake right away, but it was too late—and now Nero’s haunted by ugly suspicions
you
might be better at scribbling odes than he is. He mocks what he’s in awe of. One time when he speaks of you, he’d like to pin asses’ ears on you. The next, he’s begging someone in confidence to tell him if he’s ever heard some chance remark of yours praising his poetry, or his music, or
anything
he’s done. He won’t rest until he contrives some way to hear of you praising him truthfully, when you’re not expecting word of it to get back to him. This is excellent, my friend! You’ve not the knack of taking advantage of men’s weaknesses, but it’s power in your hands. You are his fixed star today, by which he calculates all else—you should make use of it while you have the chance.”

“I want nothing from that ballet-dancing butcher except an open trial.”

“He’ll
never
relent on that. He’s too frightened of that famous mouth. He’s not fool enough to unleash it in a public place. Anyway, public or private, a treason trial cannot be won.”

“I would not waste effort attempting to win. I mean to speak my father’s eulogy and to trick Nero into leaving my family alone.”

“There need be no trial at all! Marcus, good friend, I come with…encouraging news.”

Julianus looked sharply away. “I
know
what it is, and it does not encourage. It turns the heart to stone.” Through his own carefully cultivated network of spies, Julianus knew of this month’s assassination plot. The conspirators had enlisted the services of a robber condemned to be thrown to the beasts by luring the wretch with an offer of a better death: At a banquet in Nero’s Golden House the robber would be concealed above the ceiling behind one of the movable panels just above the Emperor’s couch. He would fall upon the Emperor, slay him, then be immediately slain himself—they hoped—by the Guard.

Domitian stared at Julianus in mute fright. Sometimes, he thought, it seemed Marcus Julianus saw through walls.

“Have no fear,” Julianus said quickly. “It’s gotten no further than me.” Some of the terror ebbed off from Domitian’s eyes. Julianus then said, “And it hardly seems well thought out. What is to keep your man from being tortured instead of killed outright—and revealing all of your names?”

“If that monster in the Palace dies before your trial, you live. I do not understand why you oppose us.”

“You speak of deliberately provoking civil war.”

“Not I. Others are doing it for us. And so like you, to name worst outcomes.”

“I do not know why you are so certain your father will emerge atop that bloody mountain of bodies.”

“I wish you would learn to look at life more as a sport.”

“It’s a sport until the suffering is your own.”

“All right, then, whatever you say, but…when freedom has been won…and if you still walk this earth with us, there is a thing I ask of you, Marcus Julianus: Will you speak my father’s cause before the Senate?”

“There are many ready to speak for your father. I do not understand your need of me.”

“You truly do not know, do you?” He shook his head slowly in puzzlement. “You are so…innocent of the effects of your own presence. I don’t know if they’re intimidated by your learning or if it’s the way you look at them, but the Senators credit your words more than men three times your age.
I
see it if you don’t. But I also need you because my forebears, let us speak plainly, were turnip eaters, and that’s all we’ll ever be, even wearing the purple. We sorely need the endorsement of one who traces his ancestry back to Venus.”