Gore Vidal’s Caligula (5 page)

“Gaius . . .” Drusilla spoke softly, a great sadness in her voice. “Gaius, what we did just now was wrong, very wrong. We must never do that again. The gods would be very angry. Tiberius would be very angry.”

Caligula turned his head in the darkness, trying to make out the expression on his sister’s face. “How can it be wrong when it makes us feel so happy? Don’t the gods wish us to be happy?” he asked plaintively.

“The gods won’t help us if we do it again, and our grandmother Antonia finds out.”

This was a warning Caligula could understand. A Roman matron of the most old-fashioned, strait-laced variety, Antonia ruled her household justly, but harshly. Her own son, their uncle Claudius, lived in mortal terror of her. Only Germanicus hadn’t been afraid of her, but he’d been her favorite son, and besides, he had been away on campaigns for most of his life. Even Livia Augusta, honored with the title Mother of Her Country, wife to the first Emperor of Rome, paid Antonia respect. Caligula shuddered at the thought of being caught in any kind of mischief by his grandmother.

Caligula and Drusilla exchanged solemn vows never, never to do “it” again—whatever “it” was, that had brought them so much joy.

During the next two nights, the Dream left the child Caligula alone. He dreamed instead of Drusilla, and in his dreams he could smell the musky fragrance of her body and hear her tiny cries of pleasure. He awoke in the mornings languid and relaxed, refreshed. But the sheets of his bed were sticky, as were his thighs, and he bribed a slave with a few coppers to take the sheets away and replace them with clean ones. There was much goodnatured laughter about this in the quarters of the household slaves—Little Boots was becoming a man.

On the third night, just as he was sinking into the sweetest of sleeps, his hand wrapped firmly around his penis, he heard a noise in the doorway and looked up, shamefaced, to see Drusilla.

“I . . . I thought I heard you cry out,” she stammered. “Was it the Dream, Gaius?”

“Yes,” he lied, knowing that she was lying too. “Oh, Drusilla, yes. I am so frightened! Hold me, sister, hold me!”

Drusilla threw back the sheet and slipped into the narrow bed beside him, keeping her eyes carefully averted from the erection that stood stiffly from her brother’s childish body. A boy’s body, but a man’s cock, she thought, blushing even to know the word.

Within five minutes they were moaning, their tongues deep into each other’s mouths. Now all of Caligula’s instincts told him not to leave one inch of Drusilla’s luscious skin unkissed or unlicked, and when he thrust his tongue into her ear and felt her stiffen against him, he knew his instincts were right. He made her lie very still as his tongue laved her navel; he wanted the taste of his sister in his mouth. As he began to graze below, licking and sucking in the tangle of golden hair, Drusilla cried out. She would have stopped him, but he held her down with amazing strength and plunged his nose and tongue deeply into her for the first time.

This was paradise, he thought. Even the nectar of the gods had not so delicious a savor as his sister Drusilla. Eagerly, he licked her juices, and felt her hips begin to move rhythmically under him, felt her belly bucking upward toward his mouth. Her rapid, gasping breath told him that she was reaching ecstasy, and he redoubled his efforts, using his teeth gently on her tiny button of sensitive flesh. Her gasps became stifled screams, and suddenly, after a furious arching of her body, she fell back limply. “No more, Gaius,” she whispered. “No more. Please.”

But Caligula had only begun. The hardness between his legs sent shooting fires through his groin and belly. There was only one place to quench those fires, one oasis of moisture. Ignoring Drusilla’s protests, he parted her thighs and slowly inserted his cock. At once, the burning stopped and an indescribable pleasure took its place. But he couldn’t get all of it in; something was blocking the way.

“No, Gaius, no!” Drusilla was trying to push him away, her face contorted in pain.

Watching her intently, Caligula drew his penis almost all the way out, then slipped it back in, just grazing the obstruction. Out again, then in. Out, in. The pain vanished from Drusilla’s face, and her eyes rolled back in pleasure.

Caligula leaned forward on his elbows. Taking her nipple between his teeth, he sucked on it hard. Suddenly, Drusilla’s knees parted fully, and she wrapped her long legs around him.

“Yes! YES!” she breathed, and he felt her hands on his buttocks urging him deeper into her. With one furious thrust, he broke through the barrier. He was in, all of him, and it was ecstasy such as he’d never known!

Drusilla uttered one shrill cry of pain, and then there were only moans of pleasure as they rocked together, joined into one. How long it went on, neither could tell. Who can define eternity? But they made love again that night, and yet again.

After that night they were never apart. Once the household had gone to its slumbers, they schooled each other, becoming expert, learning every way there was of pleasuring themselves. They experimented with positions, some so impossible to maintain that they collapsed in laughter. One night, not many after the first one, Drusilla’s lips, mouth and tongue drove her brother near to insanity; from the first, she liked the salty taste of him and swallowed it all. And one night, after licking and sucking at his sister’s anus, he managed to insert himself there and found a new joy. She liked it much less than he did.

And, one night, just as Drusilla had feared, their grandmother Antonia found them together. Unable to sleep because of the heat, she wandered into the atrium in search of a vagrant garden breeze. All the small bedrooms opened onto this indoor garden, and Antonia could hear whispers coming from Caligula’s room, although she could not make out the words. Silently, she stole forward and stood in the doorway, which was merely curtained, as was the custom in the older houses of the nobility.

Her grandchildren were lying together—naked, whispering and giggling—when the shadow fell across the bed. They looked up in terror to meet Antonia’s merciless stare. How they screamed and cried and begged! They were only talking! They were doing nothing wrong! They were naked only because of the heat! Grandmother, please listen! Please! But Antonia was made of stone. Besides, she could smell the sex-odor still lingering in the air, and she knew guilt when it was written all over childish faces.

From that moment Drusilla and Caligula were kept apart until an event which Antonia arranged to occur soon. Drusilla was married to Lucius Cassius.

It was the first time that Gaius Caligula had felt murder in his heart, that day when he stood in the wedding party and saw the only love he’d ever known bestowed on a pompous gray-haired old Roman. But Drusilla’s first husband had turned out to be impotent, and he never found out that his bride was no virgin. Instead, Drusilla gained a measure of freedom as a matron that she had never known as a girl. Caligula was able to spend many, many afternoons in her marriage chambers, avoiding his tutors, learning from his sister everything he wanted or needed. They grew closer together than ever before, with one important difference.

Now, when the Dream came at night, there was no one to hold him, nobody to make it go away. Only a slave answered when he called; there was only a slave to bring him a cup of wine with a sleeping draught in it, juice of the poppy which sent him stumbling around bleary-eyed all the next day.

But now his younger sisters were beginning to grow up, especially Julia Livilla, whose plump thirteen-year-old body matured early and sprouted a pair of luscious breasts. Julia Livilla adored her big brother Caligula; she responded to his first kisses and fondling with delight, especially when he accompanied them with bribes of figs dipped in honey. At first she was too tight and small, and Caligula had to content himself with munching on her, but she was a fresh, delicious morsel and loved nothing better than Caligula’s sixteen-year-old tongue sucking her hairless clit (unless it was the figs; perhaps she loved them just a tiny bit better). But after a few weeks of his caresses, Julia Livilla had grown hot enough, loose enough, under his hands for him to penetrate her, at least part way. It took him several days more to stretch her enough so that he could ram himself into her all the way. Still under his grandmother Antonia’s roof, and wishing no repetition of her punishments, Caligula would take his little sister deep into the gardens outside the house, to a grotto that contained a natural waterfall from a ground-fed spring, and a Herm. The waterfall masked the high sound of Julia’s squeals, and the Herm was the perfect silent witness, a sacred household statue so old it could not be dated, a statue with an eroding goat’s head and an enormous phallus.

One day, while he was driving hard into Julia Livilla, he felt the most incredible sensation at his balls. Somebody was sucking and licking them from behind and below; a thin, long tongue was probing his anus. Astonished, he looked down.

His eleven-year-old sister Agrippinilla was on her knees behind him.

Up to now, Caligula had never even given her a thought. Agrippinilla was totally undeveloped, and as flat-chested and lean as a boy. In time, she would grow tiny, budlike breasts, but she remained thin and undersized all her life. Yet she seemed to have been born to make love and, from the first, was even more adventurous and experimental than Drusilla.

By now, Caligula was an orphan. Agrippina had died, possibly by her own hand, pushed over the edge of desperation by Tiberius’ persecutions. His brothers were dead; Nero Caesar had perished by the sword, and Drusus Caesar had been starved to death in prison. Both boys had been so popular with the Romans that Tiberius had arranged to have the bodies hacked into tiny, unrecognizable pieces. Mincemeat couldn’t be cremated in any fitting ceremony, one that would give the populace a chance to mourn.

Now all that was left to Gaius Caligula were his sisters, and he grew more and more passionately attached to them. Afternoons were often spent at Drusilla’s house; her bedroom had a door that could be locked. There, the four of them played intricate and wonderful games of lust, devising new pleasures for themselves.

Now, standing on the deck of the bireme, being carried to an uncertain fate, Caligula stoked the fires of his memory.

There was the day that Agrippinilla first buried her head between Drusilla’s thighs, her long tongue darting out. Drusilla had uttered a shriek of outraged protest, but Caligula had silenced her. How aroused he had become, just watching them. The little girl’s tongue dove deeper and deeper bringing Drusilla to peals of ecstasy. Caligula’s erection had become immense and painful, and he summoned Julia Livilla, who dutifully bent her head to his crotch. Ramming into her young throat, he had watched his sisters’ sapphic pleasures with a passion that matched theirs (and he was never to lose the taste for watching women make love).

Even now, as he stood next to Macro on the deck, watching the dreaded speck of land on the horizon become larger, an aroused Caligula was grateful for the heavy folds of his cloak. He slanted his blue eyes toward the captain of the guard—those hairy, muscular types held definite appeal for him. Suppose, he told himself in amusement, just suppose he were to whip it out and order Macro down on his knees, right now? Would his command be absolute? Would Macro obey? Some day he must try it and see. Some day when he held total power over the Empire and Macro. But not yet.

Agrippinilla, mused Caligula. What talents that girl held between her lips. He hoped that her husband, Marcus Domitius, was appreciative, but that was doubtful. After the sex life she’d had as a child, what could satisfy her now in marriage to that righteous old fart? Anyway, she lavished too much attention on that fat little brat of hers, Nero, whom she had named after their murdered brother. What kind of future was she preparing for that spoiled little bastard? (If Caligula could have foretold the future, he would have trembled in dread. Born with the taste for incest already in her talented mouth, Agrippinilla—“little Agrippina”—would grow cunning, vile and ambitious. Her second husband would be an Emperor—her own uncle, Claudius—and she’d murdered him. And one of her lovers would be that self-same fat brat, her loathsome son Nero. And Nero, as Emperor of Rome, would enact his deepest fantasies on his mother by paying an assassin to stab her to death and by committing unspeakable indignities on her corpse.)

Caligula’s thoughts returned to the childhood afternoons he had spent in golden sensuality with his sisters. The sexual possibilities that four could explore were infinitely greater than with two. He and Julia Livilla would each capture one of Drusilla’s breasts, licking and sucking, while Agrippinilla took turns below with her tongue and a giant ivory phallus. Or they would form a triangle for oral copulation, with the fourth person going from one body to the next, nibbling balls or inserting a tongue.

Once, they had found a slave in the marketplace and acquired him. He was a Numidian, well over six feet tall and built in proportion, with a skin as black as Drusilla’s was fair. But his chief attraction was that he could not speak, his tongue having been cut out by the cruel knife of an earlier master.

Because he was so tall and muscular, and because his ebony penis stayed hard for hours, Caligula had invented a new game. It was based on the Rape of the Sabine Women, a favorite subject for art and poetry. And this new game was both.

It involved his sisters being stripped of their garments while pretending to struggle and scream. The slave would bind their wrists with tapes. As Caligula sat on a gilded stool, his hands busy in his naked lap, the slave would tie up the three girls, fastening their hands to the marble pillar of the bedroom, and then rape them, one after another, while they thrashed and moaned under him. At first the game was exciting because it was obvious that the rapes were really painful. But soon the girls became used to the size and hardness of the black tool, and Caligula found himself getting bored. Then, one day, inspiration led him to whisper new instructions to the slave after which he sat back and enjoyed the shrieks of his sisters as the huge black pole sodomized them thoroughly. The next day’s session was more enjoyable yet, for the girls had their revenge. This time, it was Caligula who was taken by surprise, stripped and sodomized within an inch of his life, while his sisters yelled with laughter at his screams. It was one of the best times he’d ever had.