Boy Caesar (26 page)

Laura’s surprise on closing her eyes and reopening them to a
colour-impacted hexagonal stone was decommissioned by Antony hurrying into the room to ask for his urgent attention. He could see from the anxiety in his face that it was an emergency. He knew intuitively and without having to be told that his plot against Alexander had misfired. He had felt uneasy all night, hoping against hope that his method of vilification would be endorsed by the people but at the same time knowing he had made a big error of judgement.

According to Antony, there was no time to lose. A contingent of soldiers was on its way to the palace, demanding either his resignation or his life. A splinter-group in the Army were adamant that Alexander should be appointed emperor in his place.

Unwilling to desert his side for a moment, Antony suggested they go into hiding in the Spes Vetus Gardens until the soldiers had come and gone. They would have to count on the fact that the rebellious faction were still under an oath of allegiance and that the majority of the Army had chosen to remain at their barracks under the leadership of the tribune Aristomachus.

Heliogabalus left Laura with brief instructions to take the rings and return to her rooms. He said he was needed elsewhere and that there wasn’t a moment to waste. He followed Antony and a group of his close supporters through a series of underground corridors beneath the palace and out into the wooded parkland. The air was foggy-blue November. A mob of crows were policing the area like mafia. He felt suddenly exposed, believing that by running away he had forfeited his office. The short distance he had placed between himself and the palace was like the separation between the living and the dead. He was starting to panic and feared that if the soldiers were denied killing him then they would turn their vengeance on his mother and Hierocles.

He felt helpless as he stood there in the cold fog, before being hurried on by Antony and a group of armed guards towards a pavilion that overlooked the mashed circuit used for chariot races. He had put out a contract on his cousin’s life, and now he feared the plot had been uncovered. He regretted having acted without consultation. He should have had him poisoned or drowned in the baths or hit by falling masonry on some public occasion.

He scrambled through woods in the direction of the royal pavilion. He was just coming in sight of the building when a bodyguard in front brought him to an abrupt halt by stopping him with a powerfully opposing arm. Directly in front of them a body bound by ropes had been pinned to the tree by a knife going clean through the heart and out the other side. When the guard held the head up he recognized it as Marco. The chunky diamond he was wearing at the time had been left on his finger as a warning. He knew the sign was intended for him, and he froze in his tracks, his throat furred, his heart pounding. He stood there paralysed, hardly able to believe what he was seeing, before his group forced him on. They hurried across the clearing and, after his minders had searched the place, he went on in. The pavilion, although it was stamped with his inimitable style, had been left unused because of his lack of interest in chariot racing. It had the musty air of a place thrown in on itself and shocked by their arrival.

He sat down and watched a gold chink of light make it through the closed shutters and tried to distract himself from thinking about Marco’s mutilated body and the suffering he would have undergone before the blade was punched home. He sat there dejected, knowing he would never have it easy again as long as Alexander lived. Part of him looked for a political loophole and to making some sort of compromise with the Army, while the other part wanted out and conditions of peaceful exile.

He sat there stalling for time. The seconds seemed to slow to manageable chunks of time, identifiable components in which he evaluated the major events of his life. Each moment he reviewed presented a time frame and accompanying visual. He stared at the irreversible contents of a film played in slow motion, each of the experiences coded with his individual signature.

Whatever interlude he had been granted was dramatically shattered by one of the guards running into the room to announce that a group of soldiers under the leadership of Antiochianus were drawn up outside and were threatening entry. Antiochianus was apparently the mediator, intent on negotiating terms, while the soldiers were for liquidating the entire company. The guard remained
armed, ready to die defending Caesar, his whole body wired for efficiency of purpose.

Before anyone could act, it was Antony who tore out of the room insisting he would negotiate terms. Three or four of his guards hurried in pursuit to offer protection to a man who was unarmed.

Heliogabalus couldn’t find it in himself to respond. He hated confrontation and tried desperately to convince himself that none of this was happening. He was terrified and tried to take refuge by dreaming of the imaginary island he would colonize with gay youth, its white beaches overrun with their naked bodies. The waiting seemed interminable, and he expected at every moment to be confronted by his assassins. He listened for angry shouts or gestures, but there were no sounds of an offensive, only the querulous holler of a rook signalling from the wood. After what seemed hours, Antony came back into the room and told him in a faltering voice of the conditions. The demands were that he expelled his gay entourage from the palace and, in particular, that he removed Hierocles, Gordius and Myrismus from office and from his personal company. He was also required to designate Alexander a joint consul and to respect his voice in government. If he agreed to the conditions stipulated by the Army, he would be allowed to return to the palace and continue in office. If he failed to compromise, then he could expect a military
coup.
The terms dictated were nothing less than a charged threat: change or die.

He listened with horror to the Army’s attempts to strip him of all that was meaningful in his life. Their demands shaved him to basics, but he knew he had to accept for his mother’s sake and for the nagging sense that he would otherwise be deserting his destiny. He agreed to the terms outright. He had no idea until then how much he feared death on any other terms than his own. He was too shocked to speak but managed to signal his agreement by the violent nodding of his head.

He sat and stared at the gold chinks of November sunlight atomized across the floor as Antony went back outside to accept terms. Again the wait seemed interminable as he paced the room in the attempt to keep track with his thoughts. He had no means of
redressing Marco’s death, and the image of the boy with his chest slashed open cut him up deep. The atrocity reminded him of his own precarious mortality and, when Antony came back in to tell him that the soldiers had gone, he felt an overwhelming sense of dejection. All the way back through the parkland he couldn’t free himself of his preoccupation with Marco and the way his friend had died. Rooks mobbed their progress, spilling a black calligraphy on the autumn sky.

When they got back Heliogabalus was met by a drunk Hierocles, his eyes black from the makeup he had slept in and his body draped in a woman’s négligé. He came towards him on an oscillating pivot before collapsing back on to a sofa. The man he loved and whose emotional support he needed was little more than a wreck.

Heliogabalus went over, shook him to no effect and stormed out. Inwardly he blamed Hierocles for his trouble with the military and his loss of political clout. By devoting all of his time to his lover he had lost sight of the main issues and allowed himself to become sidelined. He had somehow to pull things around if he was to continue as emperor, and this also meant cleaning up his life in accordance with the Army’s wishes. But it was a resolve he knew he would never keep. The rot in his relations with the state had gone too far. It was like a pernicious virus that had come to affect the entire organism.

He went in search of his mother, knowing that only she could calm his nerves. He found her in bed with a boy half her age, her stripped-off gown shredded like Vesuvius had slashed the transparent silk. She was sitting up in bed, her full, conical breasts on view, picking at a fruit bowl. She caught his eye simultaneous with shredding a grape and patted the bed beside her as a signal for him to sit down.

He hung back, conflicting emotions of anger and jealousy tuning his temper. The boy asleep in the bed was younger than himself, and he took it as a personal affront that his mother should turn to a toy-boy rather than himself for pleasure. But, looking at her now, a sensual ribbon of juice escaping down her chin and her eyes puffy from drink, he felt nothing but contempt for her ways. His thoughts
were still aimed at the reform necessary to change his skin. His mother, like Hierocles, was a liability. Her unpopularity with the people made it impossible for him to delegate power and take a brief period away from Rome. He knew the payback would be disastrous and that such a move would play directly into Antony’s cause.

He pushed his mother’s hand aside, as she tried to direct it to her breasts, and stripped the sheet off the bed. His anger blown, he calmed down, recognizing in her a bond that stitched them together along a crooked seam.

‘Things are bad,’ he said, sitting down beside her with his head in his hands. ‘The Army have given me an ultimatum. I either acknowledge Antony as a joint ruler or I’m as good as dead. I’ve also been told to clean up my household and get rid of the people closest to me, like Hierocles. I’ve been given no options. It’s do or die, that simple. They’ve threatened to kill us all.’

He watched his mother sober up instantly. Her mind came on with all the instincts of survival. She stood up naked, shocked into awareness, and he could see the plum-coloured love-bites blotched in clusters on her body. Her life without power and the wealth it brought would be nothing, and he dreaded proposing to her his scheme of exile and their ruling jointly over the island community he intended to establish. She had, for all her faults, been the first woman to impose laws in the Senate and, no matter how controversial her platform, her influence had carried.

‘What are we going to do?’ she asked him, turning on him with panic in her eyes. She held on unsteadily to a marble bust of herself that faced a luxuriously decorated room. He had never seen her this scared or, in a dissolute way, this beautiful. Her hennaed hair was brushed out straight, the curve of her buttocks heart-shaped and full. She stood with her back to him like an artist’s model, hands slung indignantly on her hips, her thoughts fixed in some obsessive frame.

‘We have to accept’, he said, ‘if we let go now we concede to Alexander. He has the Army’s support.’

Symiamira turned around to face him, eyes full on and powered
up. She walked straight at him and continued to shunt him all the way to the bed, where he collapsed under her weight. Her mouth sealed his like a cork in a bottle. He gave himself up to her rooting tongue as it choreographed a circular groove around his mouth. He forced her hair back from his face and tried to struggle free. The boy she had taken to bed last night continued in his drunken sleep, oblivious to everything. Glancing at him Heliogabalus thought he looked dead, except for the lift of his chest in breathing.

He managed to stall Symiamira’s passion and push her face away by placing a hand on each cheek and looking directly into her eyes. He sat up in order to gain space and positioned his hands on her shoulders. ‘I’m ordered to appear with Alexander at the calends,’ he said, ‘as a sign that we’re joint rulers. If I don’t comply with this request then they’ll come for us.’ He watched Symiamira look away, as though by refusing to believe him she would succeed in erasing the danger. She sat back from him, still disappointed at his unwillingness to have sex but aware now of the reality of the situation.

He shook her to get her attention before telling her of his newly formulated plan to set up a community on Capri. ‘We’d be safe there,’ he said. ‘As well as becoming the leaders of a new race, we’d attract to the island the world’s most beautiful youth, and all of them gay. Why shouldn’t we strike out in this direction and create an alternative society?’

Symiamira looked at him suspiciously, until the idea clicked. ‘Do you mean that buying us out would be the condition? That we’d setde and let Antony take over?’

‘Sort of. I would agree to take a less active role in government and live in exile like Tiberius. I had in mind his old hiding place.’

Symiamira played with the thought, committing it to her system like a substance of which she was unsure. He half expected her to come back at him with suicide as the only resolution to their dilemma. He didn’t tell her that his sexuality was the root cause of military hostility. He had read his own graffiti epitaphs too often to doubt the reasons for his unpopularity. Heliogabalus the bitch. The faggot pretender. The bath-house slut. He had memorized each
ugly inscription and had retaliated by a smear campaign against his cousin. He had been warned by Syrian astrologers that he would meet a violent end, and their prophecy came back to him now, as his mother answered him simply by curling up and taking refuge against his side.

He lay next to her, the day’s incidents coming back at him like a traffic accident to which he had been a spectator. He had never felt so alone in his life. He was wanted by nobody, not even by himself. As he understood events, the Army had taken Alexander into their custody so as to ensure his safety. He knew for sure that his mother’s sister Julia Mamea was a party to the plot, for she wanted to see her child Alexander as emperor, but he felt unwilling to pursue this line of investigation. He was too confused to think properly and kept hoping against the odds that the situation would reverse itself. It was the shock of it all that he couldn’t shift. It was inside him like an air-pocket that kept buffeting his nerves. He knew he could never again be the person he was two or three hours ago, and that the cutting of his privileges was like halving his identity.

Eventually he got up and decided on a course of action. He had to do something to make amends, and he decided he would start by throwing Hierocles out of the palace. That whole scene had started to get on his nerves, and now was the time to end it. Determined to act on his resolve, he left his mother and went in search of Hierocles. He found him sashaying around the dining-room on high heels, a bottle in one hand and a blond wig in the other. He looked like someone trying to drink himself sober as the agenda for the day.