Master and God (10 page)

High on a fold of drapery indoors, motionless against its deep Tyrrhenian purple hue, Musca broods, thinking up her next move. Her six feet have suckered onto the sumptuous cloth, so she hangs head-down with ease. Close by is an ornate plaster cove, creamy and delicate, its soft surface always welcoming. Less appeal belongs to the smooth polish of marble columns, though their patterning offers greater camouflage.

She fixes her attention on the human below. He sits, almost as motionless as she. He is a man who has obtained what he yearned for and now has to think what to do with it. By definition the people he most wanted to impress have died before him.

He could be asleep, but it is the fly’s business to be certain and she knows he is not.

He has failed to settle easily into his coveted role. He is the foremost man in the civilised world. Twenty nine legions in the front line provinces, plus nine elite cohorts of Praetorian Guards, three of the Urban Cohorts and seven of the vigiles, have all sworn, every man in them, allegiance to their new emperor. Son of a divine father, sibling to a newly deified brother, husband to an august wife, father of an august son. In Italy, and in every province throughout Europe, Asia and Africa, each man, woman and child now knows his name. They speak it with as much familiarity as if he were a relative; most honour him; some already revere him as a god. They erect statues of his wife; they love his infant son. Soon they will see his profile every time they hold coins. His statues will dominate marketplaces and basilicas at the ends of the Empire. Camel drovers and peat choppers, date harvesters and cinnabar miners, oyster fishers and ivory merchants will all be aware of him, the ruler who nominally cares for their welfare; has them counted; sends them benign instructions, grinds them into poverty with impossible demands for taxes.

To Musca he is merely a motionless figure. He is dressed in loathsomely clean robes, robes that are changed several times daily to meet the demands of protocol. At least the oils that scent those garments hold some fascination; even from her perch high above, Musca detects enticing undernotes of fish organs and long-fermented rotten flower-petals. Her olfactory equipment is perfect. Musca can smell death from ten miles away, then be there in an hour laying eggs in the corpse. Most attractive to her here are the teetering gold comports of ripe fruit, where pears and apples hold a sensuous hint of decay. She notices the bold stickiness left on a porphyry table, where a goblet has been carried away by a painted slaveboy, leaving dark fluff to accumulate where the cleaners’ sponges have continually missed a three-week-old circle of dripped wine.

Musca sees possibilities for a landing place on the man’s partly bald head. To a housefly, as to anybody else, this cavernous room is the height of luxury. Too much is inhospitable for Musca, though. True, high up in these festoons of drapery lie ancient seams of dust, while the comings and goings of numerous people far below have tramped in dropped hair, dander and street detritus – sometimes even a sublime slick of dog or donkey faeces or a drunk’s vomit. But too many surfaces are hard and bare. Pre-dawn, the court has been prepared with busy activity, polishing its expensive sheen to befit its occupant. Some places have even been properly washed.

Not all. Slaves have no incentive to reach high or sponge crannies.

The solitary man promises entertainment. Taking off with a light spring, Musca begins a slow test run, at first swooping gently from one side of the room to the other. She alights upon a branch of an ornate, five-foot-high candelabrum, gazing around. Though he seems to sleep, she remains watchful. With large eyes that have many lenses and all-round vision, she can see everything within the room. That includes the broken bodies of several of her relatives, prone on the surface of a marble table in front of the human. The stabbed corpses lie around an expensive writing pen with a sharp nib. She sees this, but learns little from it. Dead relations hold no interest. Suspicion is Musca’s watchword, yet flies are not sentimental.

On a side buffet stand interesting treats. There are flagons, conical sieves, little bowls of appetisers, spice grinders and goblets. Musca soars gently in that direction, criss-crossing with anticipation above the wine equipment before landing on the cold, curved rim of a silver water ewer. Head down again, she tiptoes, then sips. Buzzing happily to another container she tastes wine. After each visit she leaves behind traces of all the disgusting places she has been that day. She slicks saliva onto her front legs, considering whether to lay eggs on the food remains.

Illness has carried off the human’s father and brother. Illness will take his young son soon. He lost his own mother before he could remember her, his sister not long after. He lives in the utmost luxury, yet disease threatens continually. No one will ever explain to him that Musca and the millions like her are the biggest enemy he has. Nobody knows.

Two major bereavements in less than two years have affected him more deeply than he will ever acknowledge. He has honoured his father and brother: announced them as gods, planned monuments in their name. This does not compensate his loss. Vespasian and Titus were men of great physical and mental energy, characters who filled a house with their presence. However much he fretted against those warm-hearted heavyweights, with them both gone, his isolation weighs oppressively. His female relatives eye him up too coolly; even his wife is too conscious of her own status as Corbulo’s daughter. Distrust and disinterest sour the atmosphere around family dinner couches; there will be no comfort there. His surviving male relatives, his cousins, all have to be seen as rivals. Enough said. If they push him, he will deal with them.

He sits, as he has done now for many hours, sluggish and barely moving, in chronic depression. He stares emptily. He neither thinks, nor works, nor even enjoys the solitude he has demanded. He has realised a dismal truth. He is the Emperor. He is trapped in his role forever, not freed from impositions but doomed to spend his every hour according to the expectations of others. He must live as emperor until he dies, yet the joy he had expected eludes him. A worm of despondency gnaws; this despair will never leave him.

He will be a good emperor. Work diligently. Take a meticulous interest in all aspects of administering the Empire. Honour the gods. Rebuild, replenish coffers, tackle moral degeneration, crush revolt, initiate festivals, encourage artistic and athletic achievement, leave Rome flourishing and ready for a Golden Age. His name will reverberate through history. His fame will be perpetual.

Knowing these things is not enough.

Voices are audible beyond the massive double doors. Dimly they reach Musca, who does not react. But the human listens intently, knowing they will be talking of him. There is no other subject in his villa at Alba, only the Emperor.

The men outside, like all at the court, are waiting to see how he will behave; most are already anxious. The precedents are bad. Generally, emperors of stature came to the post when they were mature and experienced. Titus, at a mere forty, was unusual. He defied doubters, in only two years establishing himself as much-admired. Who could say whether, given time, he would have degenerated? Yet that no longer matters. His good reputation will last.

Everyone is remembering the two very young emperors: Gaius, who was known as Caligula, and Nero. Both were bywords for extravagance, cruelty and madness. Domitian is thirty. People call him the new Nero, pretending it reflects his cultural interests, yet hinting at the worse traits that brought the Senate to declare Nero an enemy of the state. Nero, too, was believed to have poisoned his brother. Will Domitian follow Gaius and Nero into tyranny, or will he develop more benignly?

Is his character already formed, his destiny predetermined? Will he have any choice?

He owns everything he could ever want. He can do anything.

He is human. Megalomania beckons alluringly.

One voice outside the room is too quiet to distinguish but the speaker’s companion is Vibius Crispus: bland, confident, self-interested, supposedly witty. Crispus trims his barque to any current. First he flourished as an informer for Nero; his own brother was accused of extortion as a provincial governor but Crispus managed to reduce the sentence. Without breaking stroke, when most Neronian informers went down, Crispus reconfigured himself to become a close associate of Vespasian and Titus. Now he manages to hold on at court as Domitian creates his own circle of advisers: Caesar’s friends, some of whom actually like their Caesar. Men who either enjoy risk, or cannot think up an excuse to avoid his notice.

These souls attempt their duties, their role as advisors, yet the new Emperor thwarts them and causes perturbation. He takes long solitary walks; fails to confide; gloomily spends hours all alone in closed rooms, doing nothing. No one thinks that he may be suffering mentally after the loss of his father and brother. Even he fails to recognise it as bereavement.

The ‘villa’ at Alba is an enormous complex, peopled by an entourage that runs into hundreds. He ought to lead them; show himself; thrill them with his presence and personality. People judge as peculiar his sitting alone for many hours, killing flies with his pen. In stuffy, traditional, upper-class Rome, it amounts to a breach of etiquette, one they will not forgive.

‘Is anybody with him?’

The reply is sarcastic: ‘No, not even a fly!’

Wrong, Crispus.

Musca is here, about to have fun. She begins her plan to annoy the man at the table. She zooms at high speed from one side of him to the other, as if winding invisible wool-skeins through the room, buzzing loudly as she goes. She dive-bombs him. She taunts him, rushing past his ear, so close he feels air shimmer with her wings. He gives no sign of noticing. He stares ahead, slowly twirling his pen between his fingers, apparently unaware of the housefly trying to torment him.

She ***!!!***

Musca will not be appearing in this story again.

T
iberius Decius Gracilis was posted to Rome for Domitian’s new Praetorian unit. The incoming emperor felt the need to show his importance by raising the number protecting him from nine to ten cohorts. It brought almost a thousand extra Guards onto the complement, including ten centurions. Gracilis had been a centurion for a number of years, rising to
primipilus
, ‘first-spear’, or chief centurion in a legion. It was a venerated post, dedicated to ensuring continuity and discipline. These officers did much more than nurture continuity, so the character of any legion owed much to the individual strengths and prejudices of its primipilus. Wielding such power could make a man seriously corrupt, though by the time anyone reached first-spear in a Roman legion, he had learned how to get away with almost anything. Oddly, some of these heroes were surprisingly straight.

It went without saying that where centurions were traditionally reckoned to be bastards, chief centurions were the bloodiest bastards of all, a role they much enjoyed.

It was a one-year post. Afterwards, the holder was entitled to take his retirement, leaving with an enhanced discharge grant and an impressive detail for the mason to chip onto his memorial stone. Yet most wanted to stay as long as possible in their army life, which offered so much simple joy and prestige. They applied to be chief centurions of further legions, taking along increasingly colourful reputations and the elaborate investment portfolios they had put together from their rewards as the army’s super-bastards.

Gracilis arrived at the Praetorian Camp with his decorations in a casket he had designed himself; first-spears adored fancy equipment. Special luggage enhanced their status, if greater status were needed. His box had neat, removable cloth-lined trays for his nine gold
phalerae
, the heavy round breastplate badges that soldiers who cared about such things jealously collected, and cedarwood inserts to hold his other awards: all his little spears and torcs and honorary bracelets, together with diplomas listing citations. When Gracilis stowed the box in his newly allocated officer’s suite, he gave it a casual kick into position as if the baubles meant little to him. However, he then instructed his servant that nobody else was to touch that casket or he would personally remove their balls with his dagger, barbecue those stinking items with rosemary, and eat them.

The servant, who had looked after Gracilis for years, smiled politely.

The centurion chewed a thumbnail. His expression was that of an overseer as he checked that a crucified thief had been nailed up straight. ‘Or I may decide on marjoram – if that’s not too girlie.’

Nobody – that is, nobody who wanted to keep his spleen intact – would call Decius Gracilis girlie.

He was sturdy, short-legged, short-armed, shrewd and competent. At forty-five, he weighed two hundred and ten pounds naked and barefoot, with a body he was still proud to own. By descent he was Spanish, though born in Northern Italy. His heavily tanned face had wide-set eyes, which gave him a startled, boyish look, and eyebrows which, despite his thinning grey hair, were still brown. In the last year of Vespasian’s reign he had been promoted out of the XX Valeria Victrix in Britain (one of the utterly glorious legions that defeated Queen Boudicca) to be first-spear of the IX Hispana (glorious for the same heroic reason), which had happened to be his grandfather’s legion, as it once served in their home province. Under the Emperor Titus, Gracilis moved on, far across Europe to Moesia, where he served in the I Italica at Novae, staring across the Danube in case the barbarians did something stupid, then further upriver to the V Macedonica at Oescus; he had been expected to shift even deeper into the interior to the VII Claudii at Viminacium, but he had heard a rumour about a new Guards cohort so applied himself to the challenge of obtaining a transfer. He got his wish; now he was here. He had never been to Rome before yet stalked the streets like a man who thought Rome should be glad to have him.