The Hadrian Enigma - A Forbidden History (8 page)

Prince Dromichaetes, a 
Tarabostes
aristocrat of the Getae Peoples, was the only son of Dacia’s king of all the lands and tribes of the Daci Confederation. He was King Diurapneus’s heir to the vast forests, ranges, and plains stretching from the Carpathian Mountains to the Rivers Tyros and Danube. He was of a line of warrior kings stretching back to the god Zalmoxis himself. Dromichaetes’ very blood was sacred.

The three circle tattoos on his face across each cheekbone told of his stature in the eyes of the god. His blue-fatted hair told of his inborn status before his fellow warriors. His destiny was foretold to lead the Wolves’ Brotherhood to glory against the Iron People’ king. His destiny was to seal the attacking king’s doom with the cunning of a stalking wolf.

Diurapneus wondered what to do with his two children. Kill them to avoid some cruel outrage at the hands of the Iron People? The enemy were known to use the young to satisfy their earthier appetites. Or herd the two into the forest’s vastness to wander alone and die of hunger or be eaten by forest creatures? Leave them to face alone the forest’s night demons, sprites, and ghouls? Or let them live to take their chances at the mercy of the enemy until Zalmoxis himself steals them to his Underworld some later day?

When the riders with their crested helmets and lances came glinting closer to view Diurapneus now knew how retreat to the Land Of Death was the most honorable path to a warrior’s glory. The shame of capture and being ceremoniously strangled at Rome before the Iron People masses was not an option.

He kissed the young prince and his sister farewell, and blessed them in the name of God Zalmoxis. He leaned close to his son’s ear and whispered ancient oaths. He swore the child to fulfill his princely destiny in the name of Zalmoxis by revenging his father and mother’s death. He extracted an oath of honor from the wide-eyed shivering boy as his sister listened close-by. The princeling uttered the oath loudly for all the trees and leaves of the forest to hear and record forever among the swirling winds and rustling leaves of Nature.

‘
By the great god Zalmoxis and his sacred lineage of kings, I Dromichaetes, Prince of the Getae, swear to take revenge upon the King of the Iron People. I swear to kill his loved ones before his very eyes, just as my father’s loved one has died. I seal this oath among the leaves and winds of the forest by my own sacred blood!’ the little boy called aloud in a wavering voice into the wooded density around him.

‘
Farewell my children until we meet again before Zalmoxis himself!’ the elder proclaimed with gusto.

Diurapneus grasped his bill-hooked dagger and rent at his own throat in a single slash. Streaming gore burst over the moldy bark of the fallen trunk of a forest tree trunk with the force of a stallion’s piss. His body fell beside his wife, their blood soaking fallen leaves.

‘
Father! Father!’ the princeling called again and again.

His sister buried her face into the furs enveloping the boy’s bony frame.

The children had seen such sprays of scarlet many times before when the womenfolk of the Wolf Warriors tormented and slaughtered captives of the Iron People. The prisoners were trussed like sheep. They sawed off the heads of the squirming, squawking captives to offer victory sacrifice to their God.

From communal cups they would sip the warm salty blood of their enemies and lick blood-tipped fingers. They shelved the cut heads around the forest altar of the god and poured the victims’ life-blood over their own faces as a food for the deity. The Wolf Warriors laughed aloud at the ironies of life and death. They danced ecstatically to the throb of tambours of human skin and the strum of stretched gut.

‘
The tyrant has deceived us! The coward has taken his own life!’

The lead rider of the Iron People troop, cavalry captain Tiberius Claudius Maximus of the
ala
II Pannoniorum
auxiliaries, was angered by the king’s too easy escape to his Underworld of Zalmoxis. In his mind Maximus could hear Diurapneus laughing at him from the Beyond.

He stripped the king’s body of its weapons, furs, jewels, and gold medallions, severed the dead man’s head with his own hooked sword, and tore off his bejeweled right arm. Each would be proof of the Dacian’s destruction for the Iron King himself, Caesar Trajan, and his senior commander Hadrian.

The seven-year-old princeling probably thought the same fate would occur to his sister and himself, but he was proved wrong.

‘
What have we here? A royal princeling and his sister? Well that’s something of value perhaps!’ Maximus called to the troop of
Iron People
legionaries.

The two children were thrust into a wooden cage on wooden wheels intended for securing the captured
Decebelus,
and trundled laboriously overland to the Roman forces. It took two days to return to Trajan’s encampment beneath the smoldering ruin of the fortress at stony Sarmizegethusa.

Dromichaetes and Estia were put on display to the troops. The two clung to each other secured behind the cage’s sturdy timbers while the Roman soldiers in iron armor bearing iron weapons shouted harsh words at them and cast handfuls of wet animal dung at the cage.

‘
A sweet lad. Weedy but sturdy,’ Trajan declared to his officers, ‘and sufficiently young to educate in our ways. As a prince of his race a portion of his father’s treasure is to be endowed to his upkeep and training. He will be a hostage ward of the State assigned to a noble family. He will blossom, and may have value in some future strategy of state. Hadrian enjoys mentoring young men. Allocate the Dacian prince to my commander.’

Trajan ignored Dromichaetes’ sister, Estia, who possessed only marital value between contending communities. Yet the antagonism against the children ceased from that moment and their protection and sustenance improved greatly.

The captured high priest of Zalmoxis, old Dicineus of the blue-fatted braids and the elegant tattoos curling into deep facial creases, whispered to the young ones how they were safe for the time being.

Dicineus, an advisor of their father’s, understood the Roman speech and the Roman ways. Dicineus was the architect of the Daci Wolf’s policy. It was also he who, with his family members and children, officiated in the sacrifice of Roman captives. He knew his days were numbered with his Roman captors. Zalmoxis now beckoned him too. Security for his own offspring was his immediate priority after attending to the Decebelus’s progeny.

‘
My Lord and Lady, children of the
Decebelus
, I bring good news to you. Your fate is well favored. The Iron People’s king, Caesar Trajan, has cast his grace upon you,’ the old man rasped. ‘You will not be sent to the Underworld to join your ancestors, as others of us may. You’ll be taken under the protection of his commander and friend, the Roman general Publius Aelius Hadrianus, who is an important senator and
praetor
at Rome.’

‘
Tell me Priest Dicineus, who is this commander Hadrianus? Is he worthy of us?’ the boy prince demanded of his aged advisor and tutor in the imperious style of a true aristocrat.

‘
You will shortly see, my Prince,’ Dicineus replied with a deeply deferential bow to the seven-year old. ‘But be assured, this is a gesture to your advantage and to your sister Estia’s advantage. Take my advice, my child. Welcome this opportunity. See where it may lead. It has possibilities.’

Hadrian looked down upon Dromichaetes from his high seat. It was the very same throne from which Diurapneus, the boy’s father, had until recently pronounced rule upon the Getae. With Dicineus as the translator, the Roman commander questioned the boy.

‘
Tell him to proclaim his pedigree, Priest. Let him tell me of his quality in his own words,’ Hadrian instructed. He then sat back to observe the boy’s responses and manner.

The muddied, soil-clothed, disheveled princeling stood steadily before his interrogator to call out in his reedy voice a well-rehearsed litany of names, titles, honorifics, and tribal clan relationships. He did it with shrill gusto. They were proclaimed in the hard guttural consonants of his native language in the proud manner the boy had heard his father declaim similar lists of honor.

‘
This boy has a noble’s manner, Priest. He deserves watching, in more ways than one,’ the Roman commander offered.

Hadrian was actually moved by the child’s courage and dignity. He smiled at the miniature warrior standing before him and nodded approvingly to Dicineus.

‘
The lad, as a barbarian, possesses a paler skin than we Romans. I assume the tattoos on each cheek with three circles proclaim his supposed bloodline from your cruel god, yes?

He’s also a hand or so taller than a seven year old of our Mediterranean world, even though generally you Dacians are not a physically imposing people. Your breeding, your diet, your angular bodily shape, your bad teeth, your lack of common cleanliness or baths, and your barbarous habits all lack the finesse of the Empire’s subjects. Yet this wiry princeling displays promise of future merit.’

‘
I am pleased that my captor approves of the child,’ Dicineus dissembled with much bowing. ‘I too have children who carry my seed and the sacred blood of Zalmoxis. Perhaps I and my family have found favor in the commander’s eyes as well? Children, at least, deserve to live.’

Hadrian smiled patiently but enigmatically.

‘
Begin the boy’s instruction in spoken Latin. He is to be prepared for display at Caesar’s victory Triumph at Rome.’

After the winter snows abated Prince Dromichaetes and Estia were brought from the rugged ranges of their homeland to the warmer climate of Italy far away to the south.

Princess Estia was taken one night into separate protection elsewhere, unexplained to the princeling. Her brother never saw her again and his pride demanded he wouldn’t ask.

Now in his eighth year, Dromichaetes walked on his short child’s legs behind Trajan’s grand chariot with its spirited chargers along the Sacred Way of Rome. The emperor’s Triumph paraded amid the raucous crowds of the great city.

The lad was awed at the spectacle of high stone structures, sweeping flights of staircases, wide avenues, marble columns, and whole buildings of red brick and white marble. It was so contrasting to the rough-cut stony ramparts, timbered palisades, or muddy daub and straw-roofed huts of his Dacia homeland.

He was chained in fine golden bonds to an officer’s wrist. Two other aristocrat captives of the Getae were shackled in hard iron together. The traitor of the Dacians, Bicilis, once the king’s best friend who turned to the Romans to reveal the hiding place of a vast treasure cleverly buried beneath a river’s bed, along with Dicineus the priest, were tethered side-by-side for display to the city.

As Trajan’s Triumph progressed through the avenues, arches, and circuses of the great city amid the roar of the crowds, the two tried to raise the boy’s spirits with jokes and smiles and heroic bravado. His little legs tried to keep up with the officer’s restrained pace. He stumbled to the flagstones again and again but scrambled nimbly to his feet each time. His wolf-fur cloak, tattoos, and blue-tinted braids conveyed to the Roman crowd’s eyes a portrait of a typical barbarian enemy, but in amusingly miniature, unthreatening dimensions.

Following after the emperor’s chariot marched cohorts of the Roman Legions of the Dacian campaign. Officers and troops of the fourteen Legions progressed proudly through the crowded Circus Maximus to the Sacred Way, past the high arches of the colossal Flavian Amphitheatre, and on to the ancient Forum, the official centre of the Empire.

They chanted ribald marching rhymes accusing their beloved emperor of lusty obscenities and vivid sexual excesses, the plausible priapic tokens of his proven gift for victory and booty. Their saucy limericks spared no reputed peccadillo.

The Legions were followed by fifty wagons of captured treasures or weapons and chained rows of captives. Ten thousand prisoners of fighting age shuffled sullen and subdued, tethered together in hemp and shackles, amid the catcalls of the
plebs
of Rome.

The cavalry captain Tiberius Claudius Maximus rode a charger holding the brine-pickled skull of the
Decebelus
aloft atop a 
pilum
spear. An aide paraded with his severed right arm impaled on a captured wolf-tail lance. These crumbling remnants of the vanquished king were held high so Roman citizens could savor his defeat, witness his shame, and celebrate his submission to Rome’s virile dominance. They shook rude gestures with their fists and shouted obscenities as the desiccated remains passed by.

Later when wine and feasting had loosened the city’s manners, the pickled head was ceremoniously flung down the city’s sacred staircase, the
Scalae Gemoniae,
as a formal insult from the Senate and People of Rome to a crushed enemy.

The skull lobbed and slipped and bounced down the majestic flight into a sewer’s gutter at the bottom. Then it was cast into the turbulence of the River Tiber racing through embankments close by.

Dicineus and Bicilis were taken to the same staircase, pressed to their knees, and slowly garroted by sturdy men wielding thin nooses. Their broken bodies too were cast into the Tiber. The crowds and assembled patricians of Rome cheered themselves hoarse at their public humiliation.

But Dromichaetes was not harmed in the Triumph celebrations despite him being of the same blood as the enemy. Nevertheless the boy’s declining status as a prince of the Getae was slowly becoming apparent to him. No one was bowing to him anymore.