The Silver Chalice (65 page)

There was an interruption at this point. Selech’s eyes had focused on something at a distant table. He called down to the buyer of food: “Demetrius, betake yourself to the capon table. Warn them most solemnly about the stuffing. There must be plenty of ginger and a somewhat less heavy hand with the pepper and allisander. Our master complained about the stuffing last night. He thinks us deficient in such niceties.”

Demetrius turned almost purple with resentment. He walked up beside Selech and said in his ear: “He thinks us deficient in the niceties of seasoning, does he? What does he know about such things, except perhaps”—his voice fell almost to nothing—“the niceties of
seasoning mushrooms!
”

Selech turned back then to Basil. “I have not been as fortunate as you. I have never seen Peter. He is in Rome, as you doubtless know, and I have heard from him, but never have my eyes rested on that divine old man. Someday, I trust, it will be my privilege to see him and talk with him. You, my young friend, have been highly privileged. You have seen Luke.”

“When I was in Jerusalem I saw Paul and James and Jude. On the way here from Antioch I stopped at Ephesus and heard John preach.”

Excitement grew beneath the calm surface of Selech’s eyes. “You have seen Paul and James and Jude! Young man, young man, how great your privileges have been. And you have heard John preach! Was it like seeing the heavens roll back and hearing a great voice come to you from beyond the stars?”

“It was indeed like hearing the voice of Jehovah. It was clear to us who heard him that he had talked with God.”

“And what word have you of Paul?”

“He is still in prison. The last word we received was that he had appealed to Caesar.”

A strained look appeared on Selech’s face. “This means that sooner or later he will be sent here. There is no fault in Paul, but he will be condemned to death if he is tried in Rome. Public opinion is being stirred up against us.” After a moment given to anxious thought he said: “They
seem to be drawn here, the leaders of the church, by an influence and a force that may be that of God. I very much fear they come here to die.” He lowered his voice to a cautious whisper. “There are many hundred Christians in the palace. More than half of my people belong. You see, they are slaves, and the teachings of Christ give them hope and a life everlasting to look forward to. But a word of advice, young man: never let it be known that you are one of us. There are perhaps three men in the palace whose discretion could be counted upon. I will tell you who they are; have no confidences with anyone else. People talk, even the kindest and the best-intentioned.”

On a table just below the raised platform of supreme authority the wine-drawers were preparing to open a leather bottle of such extreme antiquity that it seemed capable of falling to pieces at the touch of a careless finger. Selech found it necessary to give them all his attention. His fine high forehead gathered itself up into a nervous and somewhat irritable frown.

“Have a care!” he cried. “You are not handling a pig’s bladder filled with mashed pompion. That bottle has been lying in the cellar for two hundred years, waiting for the moment when the voice of a Caesar would demand it.” He indulged in a fretful sigh and said for Basil’s ear alone: “They will find in it nothing but a residue as thick as honey. This will have to be taken out with the greatest care and then thinned slowly in water. There must be the smallest conceivable tincture of rose in the water, no more than a single leaf to a quart. The water must be heated just so much and no more. If it should be allowed to come to a boil, that priceless wine would be ruined. It is a gift to us from ages past, and we must treat it with due reverence. When it comes to straining the wine, I shall do it with my own hands.”

“Will this old wine be very potent?”

Selech shook his head. “There will be about it a richness and a delicacy. When Caesar touches this ambrosial wine to his lips, he will know that all the refinements, all the gathered wisdom and light of two centuries have come to him in a single sip.”

Selech seemed too concerned with his responsibilities for further talk, so Basil got to his feet. The head cook nodded his approval. “See, they are getting ready to take up the first course,” he said. “If you are to sup with Caesar, you had better make your way at once to the banqueting hall and find yourself a place. You will not want to miss anything of this.” He nodded with pride. “It will be a spectacle worth seeing. And I promise you it is a feast you will remember until you are laid out in cerements.”

A procession was forming on one side of the room. In the van were the musicians, robed in gold and red and with bay leaves in their hair. There were players on the lyre, the cithara, the trigonon. Some had their ninereeded pipes of Pan ready at their lips, some were prepared with the double clarionet, some had trumpets of Galatian bronze slung over their shoulders, their lungs filled for the first triumphant blast. The cymbal players had their half globes strapped to their wrists, the drummers had their sticks poised for the first rumbling beat on the gut stretched tautly across the tympanon.

Behind the musicians there was a long train of servants in immaculate white with trays on their heads. On each tray was a saucepan of Corinthian brass, smoke seeping out from the false bottoms that held fires to keep the foods warm. These saucepans held the amazing variety of dishes that made up the first course: the dormice prepared with poppy juice; the many varieties of sea food, encircled with damson plums and sprinkled with cummin and benzoin root; sausages made with eggs and breast of pheasant; eggs made of paste and colored blue and filled with the yolks in which nestled a fine fat little ortolan roasted to a turn; grasshoppers fried to a light golden brown and sweetened with honey; lettuce and large black olives; pomegranates cut open and garnished with rosebuds.

Selech, his chin raised high and his finely chiseled features tense, rose to his feet. He raised a baton in the air, and his eyes went up and down the procession to make sure that no detail had been neglected. He waved the baton once and then brought it down.

Immediately the drummers went to work, the cymbals clashed, the bronze trumpets sounded a fierce, harsh note. Everywhere the slaves stood at attention beside their tables and fires, their eyes rolling with excitement. Each one had something to wave, a poker, a cleaver, a basting spoon. Demetrius, in a frenzy, jumped up and down on his platform and waved his hands, with their closely bitten nails, above his head. He shouted in a high voice: “The first course is going up! Great of the earth, prepare yourselves for it! Open thy mouth, O Caesar, the first course is ready for you!”

When Basil reached the banqueting hall of the Caesars, the guests of Nero were already stretched out on their couches. Their hands and feet
had been laved with perfumed snow water, which slaves had carried about among the tables. A short prayer had been said to Jupiter and a pledge had been drunk from crystal wine cups, each drinker spilling a drop or two on the floor for the invisible lares.

Basil was escorted by Septimus to a small table that, clearly, had been reserved for him. Although within twenty feet of the couch where Nero reclined, it was well off to one side and partially screened by a high bank of flowers. From this point of vantage he could see everything. He stole one glance at the Emperor, surprised to see how young he looked in spite of an early corpulence, and then found his eyes drawn to Poppaea beside the ruler. The new Empress was a vision of snow-white skin and delicate tintings of pink, of reddish hair that glinted and crinkled under the lights in the tall candelabra above her, of shoulders slender and milky in a white silk
palla
edged with blue.

He opened the blue cloth bag on the table and fumbled at the strings, his eyes still fixed on this rose-leaf beauty who was already being called the Wicked Empress.

“Am I to begin at once?” he whispered. There was no answer. Turning, he found that Septimus had already withdrawn.

The second course was being brought in with as much fanfare as the first one. Acrobats capered ahead of the procession, turning handsprings and somersaults. The musicians were piping and sawing, the drummers drumming madly. A table stretched its full length of forty feet in front of the Emperor’s couch, covered with gold cloth and piled high with flowers at intervals. One of the marching chefs deposited a wild boar’s head in the center of the table and started flames crackling about it while his fellows paraded before the ruler of the world with dishes for his inspection and selection: capons and ducks and peacocks (with their tails spread out in full glory), wild game, rare fishes highly seasoned, young pigs roasted whole, great loins of beef with pink flanks and rib bones dripping with fat, quarters of stag and roebuck.

Nero took no interest in the food. Some remains from the first course were still about him on platters, but he had eaten little. Occasionally he cracked off the head of a paste egg and scooped out the contents, but it was done with no enthusiasm. Caesar lacked appetite and, as those about him noted with distress, he most clearly was suffering from boredom.

Basil, at his solitary table behind the banked flowers, satisfied his hunger with a slice of beef, on which a few drops of the new and pungent garum had been sprinkled, and a concoction of preserved figs served with
damson plums. He did not linger over the meal and, at the finish, laved his hands in a dish of scented water brought to him by a slave whose eyes were never raised from the floor. After a deep pull at his wine cup (how could any wine be so wonderful!) he instructed the slave to remove all the dishes, and then spread out the contents of the blue cloth in the space thus provided.

A sense of satisfaction took possession of him. He hummed softly to himself as he set to work.

The head of Caesar was an immediate challenge. Under a mass of coarse red curls the protuberant eyes of the world’s master stared out, avid for admiration, watchful, as though underneath he lacked any sense of assurance. His nose was ill-formed and bulbous. The auburn beard had recently been shaved off (and the strands saved for posterity in a golden box embossed with pearls and precious stones), thus revealing the thick and puffy lips and the cruel but weak mouth. It was a face in which perplexity vied with savagery and the instincts of a mild youth were being submerged in the urgings of lust and ambition.

Basil took no more than a moment of study of this rather frightening face in reaching a decision as to what he would do. A head such as this was not to be presented in the conventional Roman fashion, with blank eyes and stiffly formal hair. Instead he would show Caesar as a human being; exactly as he saw him, in fact, a clumsy hobbledehoy who was still capering like a wood sprite but was changing rapidly into an evil satyr. The imperial eyes, he decided, must be made to look out at life with uncontrollable eagerness; the nose and mouth must reveal the appetites that were growing in him. This might not be what Caesar wanted of him, but he must risk it. If the likeness already coming to life with the first pressure of his fingers proved displeasing to Nero’s pride, then he would betake himself away as quickly and unobtrusively as he could. No harm, he hoped, would have been done.

It was not until he was well along with his work that he caught sight of Simon Magus. The great magician was sitting bolt upright in the center of the great banqueting hall and eating with an air almost of condescension. He had robed himself in black, and above this funereal garb his bony face looked sinister and withdrawn. The other guests had shunned the seats and couches immediately about him, and so he sat in an isolation that added to the effect he was creating.

Watching him, while he allowed his hands to become idle momentarily, Basil recalled the scene in the House of Kaukben when the cord
beneath the rug had been tugged and the vessel of water spilled. “He is crooked,” he thought, finding it hard not to laugh. The sinister quality of Simon was no more than a pose, but it happened to be a pose that was deceiving all of Rome.

Up to this moment he had taken no interest in the company, but now he found himself glancing about in the hope of finding Helena. She was not to be seen, and this was not surprising, for there were several hundred people in the hall. He assumed that all the great of Rome had assembled to do honor to their young Emperor, having no way of knowing that the company was a peculiarly mixed one, that with the members of the old Roman families were the new rich who had risen through political activities and the manipulation of state contracts, as well as the younger group who were running after false gods, a gay and sophisticated set under the leadership of Petronius.

It was not an edifying scene. The guests of Caesar were eating and drinking to excess, and license had been given full rein. They talked in shrill voices and laughed loudly and foolishly; they flirted and ogled. The men went prowling on feet that were unsteady and visited the couches where the youngest and prettiest of the ladies were ensconced, seating themselves beside the languid occupants and serving them solicitously. They offered wine cups to lips that were held up invitingly for more than the caress of the golden wine.

Helena must be somewhere in the room. She would not have neglected the chance to be present on such an occasion, but Basil failed to see her. There was, he thought, a resentment of her absence in the stiff attitude of Simon. Was she languishing somewhere in the hall with a new admirer?

Basil said to himself, “I am here to record the features of Caesar, not to watch the antics of his guests.” He turned his back with relief on the bacchanalian scene and kept resolutely at his task.

Nero was not drinking and he was doing no more than trifling with the luscious fruits and the rich tarts and cakes of the dessert. It was clear that he was finding the evening a dull one. His lips were gathered up in a pout, his low forehead wore a scowl, and his eyes found no pleasure even in the unruffled beauty of Poppaea. He looked about him with an air that
said plainly, “These shallow worldlings, satisfying their gross appetites while divinity watches in disgust!”