The Kingdom of the Wicked (57 page)

       'I'm totally unworthy.'

       'No. You're a Roman. You know Rome. It's your city.'

       'A Greek in fact. But long in Rome.'

       'Right, you know the Rome of the streets and the squares and the fountains. And the Rome of the cellars and the dark places.'

       'We practise the faith in the sunlight. We've no need of the dark places.'

       Peter shook his head several times. 'No. You'll be glad of the dark places. I can feel it coming. Smash the Jews for revolting and smash the Nazarenes while you're about it, the Nazarenes being only a kind of Jews.'

       'That's not true any more.'

       'I know it's not true. I know only too well it's not true. Something went wrong somewhere.'

       'This is a great moment for us, your coming here. You must speak to the church.'

       'In Aramaic?'

       'The language of the master, the authentic voice. Heavens, it's still hard to take in. You knew him, worked with him, saw him crucified in that place, on that hill

       'Golgotha. No, I wasn't there. God help me, I wasn't there.'

       The meeting was held in a disused gymnasium, not far from the Garden of Maecenas and the Mansion of Aulus, at the corner of the Via Labicana and the Via Tiburtina . Some of the Roman Christians were Jews and remembered their Aramaic; most of them were uncircumcised, some fairhaired; some were of the patrician class. The Gentiles looked with a little awe and a certain contempt hard to hide on this unkempt ancient, a pioneer from the mists, unable to explicate the mystery of the Trinity or relate the coming of the Messiah to an obscure prophecy in Vergil's Eclogues, talking about the genesis of the Paternoster in a remote and uncouth tongue: 'For Jesus himself taught me this prayer, me and my companions, common fisherfolk, when we were fishing in the lake of Galilee. A storm arose and we were afraid, but he told us never to feel fear. We must trust in the father who keeps us in his care, praying: 'Our father, who are in heaven, may your name be blessed. . .' They joined in, some in Greek, most in Latin. But the Gentiles were all a little embarrassed.

       When the meeting broke up after the blessing and munching of the sacramental bread, those whose sense of smell was well developed sniffed at smoke coming from the south on a hot dry wind from the south. Peter could smell nothing.

Nobody knows how the fire began, but there are still some who swear they saw Tigellinus setting a brand to an oilshop all of dry wood just north of the Servilian Gardens on the Aventine. Nearly all the dwellings there were of wood and, in that dry summer's night heat, it was pure tinder. Accius owned the oilshop but did not live in it. Seeing it blaze from his door fifty yards away, he yelled for men to draw buckets from the fountain, to form a bucketempying chain, but the yellow and blue tongues licked the water and asked for more. The heat brought sweat and the sweat blinded. Black flinders gyrated in the fiery air like bats. The fire climbed the hill and crunched the pines, ate the wooden summer house of Lucius Aemilius and grew fat on it. The family of C. Aeserninus was trapped in its small brick mansion when the fire entered and climbed the stairs, eating as it went. A child was thrown in mother's panic from an upper casement and was brained on the stone surround. In District XI on the borders of the Tiber the tenements near the Circus Maximus sang a blazing song to high heaven, invisible in the smoke, and the hundred families within fought each other with claws out, coughing more than screaming, as they blocked the stair-well. Those who survived the desperate tearing saw the fire coming in for them at the main tenement entrance. Some yelled their way through it and then ran till they dropped, having turned into fire. The black flakes danced and rode on the wind and dissolved like black snowflakes into the river, what time men waded in the river with their canvas buckets and passed up water which was a mere dandelion in the jaws of a cow. A warehouse near the crossing of the Via Ostiensis and the Via Latina was crammed with jars of olive oil which burst their stoppers or cracked in the flames and sent out a fiery aromatic river with squeaking rats swimming on it, tails little torches, pelts singed. The library of the Aequiculi on the Aventine was housed in marble, but fire was puffed in through a casement whose wooden shutters were speedily devoured, and then a treasury of Greek and Roman history was a swift meal like frozen fruit juice to the thirsty jaws of the gang of flame. The librarian Bogudes made a longer snack, but he joined his manuscripts in ashes.

       The fire spread east as well as north, as far as the Caelian. The Temple of the Divine Claudius was the core of a terrible conflagration in which the houses of priests and augurs went up in spite of prayers that the flapping of the flames drowned. Men and women in undress or full dress blackened and smoking at the hems ran the streets moaning, carrying household treasures of no value. The Temple of Isis seemed to put out a hand of Egyptian magic to forbid the passage of fire further to the east; it was obeyed. To the north of the city, in the area enclosed by the Pantheon, the Mausoleum of Augustus and the Castra Urbana, fire raged that seemed to owe nothing to the colonizing zeal of the scarlet empire to the south, for the Baths of Agrippa, the Temple of Jupiter, and the headquarters of the city vigiles were a zone untouched by even the tips of the fingers of the terror.

       Pagan Romans, those who had sat with their gristly sausages and skins of watered wine howling for the real red at the games, stacked and ranked in a semblance of mock civic order, were now thousands of ants scurrying from the fist dinged and dinged and dinged again on their hills. What do we care about them, Canus and Capys and the Casca brothers, Cestius and Crassus and Domitilla and Fausta and Augusta and the dancing girls just in from Alexandria, Polla and Vettius, the brothel madam Omphale, Macro and Marius, the Salnatores and Livius and Livilla and? Little, since we do not know them. But Caleb and his wife Hannah and their son Yacob we have at least met. They were tenement dwellers in the north of District XII, with two rooms on the fifth floor. They were in bed, and they woke to strange light and heat and noise. 'The skies are on fire!' Hannah screamed, and she grasped the sleeping boy. In their night attire they fell over each other to the door and saw men and women scampering, all tangled hair and bare legs, down the stairway, children clutched and howling. Caleb ordered his wife to stay behind him, clutching his robe with one hand and their son with the other, as he proceeded brutally to fist his way through the gasping and coughing throng that grew thicker at each new landing of the stairway, all eager to crush each other and be crushed and then to be eaten by the flames that waited at the great door of the tenement building. 'Now!' Caleb cried, and they thrust down to the second landing, clawed back at, clutched, bleeding. In the wall was an open casement and beneath it a clutch of young arbutus well lighted by flames from the left but itself as yet untouched. 'Now!' he yellcoughed, then he leapt out to the air. The bush broke his fall and he stood barefoot on hot earth. 'Throw him!' She threw the child blindly, and Caleb as he caught him had no time to be puzzled that the boy was not a yelling wheel of limbs but strangely still as though sleeping through it all. He placed the child on the ground while Hannah hurled herself at his arms from the high window. He caught her. She picked up Yacob. The boy bled heavily from the head. Was that bare bone showing through? She could not scream, only cough her heart out at the hidden heavens. They ran with the body south and hardly stopped till they reached the triple junction of the Via Ardeatina, the Via Latina and the Via Appia. Here there was no fire, only a huddle of moaning mourning bereft.

       Marcus Julius Tranquillus and his wife and daughter were safe on the Janiculum, as most of the Christians were safe on the Viminal and Esquiline. The Jews had suffered down there in Districts XII and XIII, their shops ruined, cheap wooden houses charcoal fringed with fire sated. Those on the outskirts of the fire on the Caelian saw Rome burn to the northwest, the Palatine too. Some, looting, were drunk and saw more. Julius Caesar marched a flaming legion through the streets, Romulus and Remus sucked fire from the dugs of a wolf that was all fire, it was rumoured that the Tiber was all aflame with the oil that had rolled heavily into it from the store south of the Circus Flaminius. Jupiter rode a flaming winged bull over the flames, picking up gobbets of flame in his hands and hurling them high in joy. The Vestal Virgins held up flaming skirts to show flaming pudenda. Over the bridge that led from the Capitoline to the Naumachia Augusti the screaming ants scurried, with no eyes for the imperial barge moored to the Tiburine island just to their north. There the Emperor and his entourage watched the fire march and blare over the Circus Maximus to the Palatine, indifferently crunching and swallowing the fine parkland and the gorgeous palaces. Tigellinus said, deeply moved by the purple and gold majesty of the invading army of flame, that there was virtue in catastrophe, that now Rome, or Neropolis if that was to be its new name, had to be remade, even the Senate must see that. Nero said, trembling as if on the brief road to orgasm:

       There's no art like this. No music or lyric verse or tragedy like this. At last I see what I've only sung before. End of the second Troy, birthpangs of the third and last.' And he sang:

              'Richly enrobed in the flames of her funeral,

              Ilium yielded her limbs to the fingers of fire,

              Lovingly, lustingly, cooing like columbines,

              Roaring like lions and howling like wolves of the wood . . .'

       But he felt the despair of even the major artist at the inadequacy of words. The huge smoke pall had blotted out stars and moon, the tiny smut bats flew in massive disorganized hordes, smoke choked, Rome was eaten steadily, the blackened marble not yielding but the hidden supports of wood chewed to nothing, the metal struts buckling in their white heat. And all the time, across the river, the screams and groans and manic coughing of a city that had suffered before as all cities must suffer but never before like this. Rome had had her fire watch for two hundred years, trained men with waterpumps in their station just west of the Via Lata, but the strong dry wind blew fire up at them from the south and they retreated hopeless. Only with the sudden shift of the wind to the northwest did it seem possible to shove the fire back from the threatened Forum and the northern edge of the Palatine. But it was too late for the rescue ladders and the damp blankets huge as fields in the stricken streets of the tenements. The citizens of Suburra, the Quirinal and the Esquiline came down with slow timidity to the Gardens of Maecenas and the fringe of what was to be the Domus Aurea to see those who had flung themselves north of the horror with a kind of sick wonder but also the desire to help, but they felt helpless in the face of maddened women with charred hair screaming over the charred bodies of their children. The smell of Rome had become the smell of a barber's singeing multiplied a manic millionfold.

       Peter, whose new home was the shop of Aquila, since he could no longer face the climb to Linus's apartment, spoke of Sodom and Gomorrah, but the Gentiles did not comprehend the reference. It was the task of Christians to give aid to the stricken, but what help could they give except prayer? Those who lay stricken in the Gardens of Maecenas or in the streets in the triangle whose base was the Via Praenestina looked up in weak bewilderment to see an old bearded man with a staff raise spread fingers over them and mutter magic spells in an uncouth language. Luke the physician brought his scrip of ointments but stood impotent over hard dry blackened flesh beyond mere soothing. There was terrible thirst about and it could be slaked, but too often it was a viaticum before a sleep from which there was no rousing. Catullus strode glowing like a cinder muttering about una nox dormienda.

       Dawn fought its way through the pall, which was drifting to the southeast. It would have been better if the night had continued, hiding the poor blackened corpses, the timbers whose dying glow could be roused to a brief curse of flame in the dawn breeze. The stench was insupportable, the black flinders flew languidly, burnt-out groves sent, in the stronger wind of full morning, flurries of skeletal leaves, substance eaten but veins miraculously whole. The nakedness brought a new obscenity: the city had cast off the clothes of its foliage to glory in the visible horror of its mutilation. For two days corpses lay untended for the rats to gnaw. In the dying smoke a smoky figure or two could be seen stumbling bowed over and through the ruins, searching and not finding or else, in crazed automatism, affirming life through aimless locomotion. On the third day the Senate called itself together and found some of its members missing. None knew where the Emperor was: it was rumoured that he had transferred himself and the remnant of his court to quarters in the Castra Praetoria. Gaius Calpurnius Piso was elected head of a small body of inquiry into the causes of the fire which still smouldered and occasionally flared. The group glumly trod rubble, jumped away from sudden disclosures of healthy flame beneath it, put togas over noses in the presence of black cadavers. On the Aventine they met, as they thought they might, Tigellinus and a maniple of Praetorians. He was waiting for Caesar. Who arrived in a litter. With him was the Empress, clearly pregnant. Piso introduced himself, stating the Senate's business.

       And, of course, to supervise the provision of places of refuge for the unfortunate victims.'

       'I know you, Piso, don't think I don't. You rebuked me in the Senate for various derelictions whose nature I can't clearly remember. Can nobody do anything about this stench? See, the Empress is being made sick by it all.' A senator made a token gesture of waving the stink away. 'Well,' Nero said, 'as to the homeless, poor souls, your Emperor has already made certain arrangements. The imperial gardens are at their disposal, and carpenters and tentmakers are already providing temporary shelters. Also, of course, the Campus Martius is being made ready for housing what I fear must be an incomputable number of sick and homeless. Messengers have been sent to Ostia to bring in emergency supplies. Things are being taken care of. Did you anticipate otherwise?'