Roma Eterna (8 page)

The next day commenced with the arrival of one of Menandros's slaves, bearing a note telling him that it was the ambassador's pleasure to carry out a third exploration of the subterranean city in midafternoon. He had a special interest, Menandros said, in seeing the chapel of Priapus and the pool of the Baptai, and perhaps the catacomb of the sacred whores of Chaldea. The ambassador's mood, it seemed, had taken an erotic turn.

Quickly Faustus dashed off a note to the Caesar Maximilianus, telling him of the day's plans and requesting him to summon Danielus bar-Heap the Hebrew once more to be their guide. “Let me know by the sixth hour where you would like us to meet you,” Faustus concluded. But midday came and went with no reply from the prince. A sec
ond message produced no response either. By now it was nearly time for Faustus to set out for the Severan Palace to pick up the ambassador. It was beginning to look as though he would be Menandros's sole escort on today's expedition. But Faustus realized then that he did not care for that idea: he felt too dour this morning, too cheerless and morose. He needed Maximilianus's high-spirited company to get him through the task.

“Take me to the Caesar,” he told his bearers.

Maximilianus, unbathed, unshaven, red-eyed, wearing a coarse old robe with great rents in it, looked startled to see him. “What is this, Faustus? Why do you come to me unannounced?”

“I sent two notes this morning, Caesar. We are to take the Greek to the Underworld again.”

The prince shrugged. Clearly he hadn't seen either one. “I've been awake only an hour. And had only three hours of sleep before that. It's been a difficult night. My father is dying.”

“Yes. Of course. We have all been aware of that sad fact for some time and are greatly grieved by it,” said Faustus unctuously. “Perhaps it will come as a deliverance when His Majesty's long ordeal is—”

“I don't mean simply that he's sick. I mean that he's in his last hours, Faustus. I've been in attendance on him all night at the palace.”

Faustus blinked in surprise. “Your father is in Roma?”

“Of course. Where do you think he'd be?”

“There were stories that he was in Capreae, or Sicilia, or perhaps even Africa—”

“All those stories are so much nitwit blather. He's been right here for months, since he came back from taking the waters at Baiae. Didn't you know that?—Visited by only a very few, of course, because he's become so feeble, and even the shortest of conversations drains his strength. But yesterday about noon he entered into some sort of crisis. Began vomiting black blood, and there were some tremen
dous convulsions. The whole corps of doctors was sent for. A whole army of them and every last one of them determined to be the one who saves his life, even if they kill him in the process.” In an almost manic way Maximilianus began to list the remedies that had been employed in the last twenty-four hours: applications of lion's fat, potations of dog's milk, frogs boiled in vinegar, dried cicadas dissolved in wine, figs stuffed with mouse liver, dragon's tongue boiled in oil, the eyes of river crabs, and any number of other rare and costly medicines, virtually the whole potent pharmacopeia—enough medication, Faustus thought, to do even a healthy man in. And they had done even more. They had drawn his blood. They had bathed him in tubs of honey sprinkled with powdered gold. They had coated him in warm mud from the slopes of Vesuvius. “And the ultimate preposterous touch, just before dawn,” said Maximilianus: “the naked virgin who touches her hand to him and invokes Apollo three times to restrain the progress of his disease. It's a wonder they could even
find
a virgin on such short order. Of course, they could always create one by retroactive decree, I guess.” And the prince smiled a savage smile. But Faustus could see that it was mere bravado, a strenuously willed flash of the sort of cool cynicism Faustus was supposed to expect from him: the expression in the Caesar's red-rimmed, swollen eyes was that of a young man pained to the core by his beloved father's suffering.

“Will he die today, do you think?” Faustus asked.

“Probably not. The doctors told me that his strength is prodigious, even now. He'll last at least another day, even two or three, perhaps—but no more than that.”

“And is your brother with him?”

“My brother?” Maximilianus said, in a dumbfounded tone. “My brother's at his hunting lodge, you told me!”

“He came back, the night before last. Gave audience to the Greek at the Hall of Marcus Anastasius. I was there myself.”

“No,” Maximilianus muttered. “No. The bastard! The bastard!”

“The whole meeting lasted perhaps fifteen minutes, I suppose. And then he announced that he would be leaving town again the next morning, but surely, once he found out that your father was so gravely ill—” Faustus, comprehending suddenly, stared in disbelief. “You mean you never saw him at all, yesterday? He didn't go to visit your father at any time during the day?”

For a moment neither of them could speak.

Maximilianus said, finally, “Death frightens him. The sight of it, the smell of it, the thought of it. He can't bear to be near anyone who's ill. And so he's been careful to keep his distance from the Emperor since he took sick. In any case he's never cared a spoonful of spider's piss for my father. It's perfectly in character for him to come to Roma and sleep right under the same roof as the old man and not even take the trouble of making inquiries after his health, let alone going to see him, and then leave again the next day. So he would never have found out that the end was getting very close. As for me, I wouldn't have expected him to bother getting in touch with me while he was here.”

“He should be summoned back to Roma again,” Faustus said.

“Yes. I suppose he should be. He'll be Emperor in another day or two, you know.” Maximilianus gave Faustus a bleary look. He seemed half addled with fatigue. “Will you do it, Faustus? Straight away. Meanwhile I'll bathe and dress. The Greek is waiting for us to take him down below, isn't he?”

Thunderstruck, Faustus said, “You mean you want to go there now—today?—while—while your father—?”

“Why not? There's nothing I can do for the old man right now, is there? And his doctors solemnly assure me that he'll last the day.” A kind of eerie iciness had come over the Caesar suddenly. Faustus wanted to back away from the chill that emanated from him.

In a fierce, cold voice Maximilianus said, “Anyway, I'm not the one who's going to become Emperor. It's my brother's responsibility to stand around waiting to pick up the reins, not mine. Send a messenger off to Heraclius to tell him he had better get himself back here as fast as he can, and let's you and I and the Greek go off and have ourselves a little fun. It may be our last chance for a long time.”

 

On such short notice there was no way of finding the Hebrew, so they would have to do without his invaluable assistance for today's outing. Faustus felt edgy about that, because spying on the chapel of Priapus was not without its risks, and he preferred to have the strong, fearless bar-Heap along in case they blundered into any trouble. Maximilianus, though, did not appear to be worried. The prince's mood seemed an unusually impetuous one, even for him, this day. His fury over his brother's absence and the strain of his father's illness had left him very tightly strung indeed, a man who gave every indication of being on the verge of some immense explosion.

But his demeanor was calm enough as he led the way down the winding ramp that entered the Underworld beside the Baths of Constantinus and guided them toward the grotto where the rites of Priapus were enacted. The passageway was low-roofed and moist-walled, with splotchy gray-green fungoid stains clinging to its sides. Menandros, as they neared their goal, displayed such signs of boyish anticipation that Faustus felt both amusement and contempt. Did they no longer have any such shady cults in Constantinopolis? Was Justinianus such a stern master that they had all been suppressed, when Justinianus's own wife Theodora was herself a former actress, said to be of the loosest morality imaginable?

“This way,” Maximilianus whispered, indicating an opening in the cavern wall, the merest sliver of an entrance. “It takes us up and over the chapel, where we'll
have a very good view. But be absolutely quiet in there. A single sneeze and we're done for, because this is the only way out, and they'll be waiting for us here with hatchets if they find out we've been spying on them.”

The passage slanted sharply upward. It was impossible for men as tall as Maximilianus or Faustus to stand upright in it, though Menandros had no difficulty. The nimble young Maximilianus moved easily there, but Faustus, slow and bulky, found every step a challenge. Quickly he was sweating and panting. Once he banged his lantern against the wall and sent a reverberant thump down the length of the passage that drew an angry hiss and a glare from Maximilianus.

Before long came confirmation that a service was in progress: a clash of cymbals, the booming of drums, the hoarse screech of horns, the high jabbing of flutes. When they reached the place from which the scene below could best be viewed, Maximilianus gestured for the lanterns to be laid to one side where they would cast no gleam that could be spied from the shrine, and moved Menandros into position for the best view.

Faustus did not even try to look. He had seen it all too many times before: the wall covered with gaudy erotic murals, the great altar of the god of lust, and the seated figure of Priapus himself with his enormous phallus rising like a pillar of stone from his thighs. Half a dozen naked worshipers, all of them women, were dancing before that fearsome idol. Their bodies were oiled and painted; their eyes had a wild, frantic shine; their nostrils were distended, their lips were drawn back in toothy grimaces, and the dancers' swinging breasts bobbled freely about as they leaped and pranced.

Chanted words came up from below, harsh jabbing rhythms:

“Come to me, great Lord Priapus, as sunlight comes to the morning sky. Come to me, great Lord Priapus, and give me favor, sustenance, elegance, beauty, and delight.
Your names in heaven are LAMPTHEN—OUOTH OUASTHEN—OUTHI OAMENOTH—ENTHOMOUCH. And I know your forms: in the east you are an ibis, in the west you are a wolf, in the north you have the form of a serpent, and in the south you are an eagle. Come to me, Lord Priapus—come to me, Lord Priapus, come—”

One by one the women danced up to the great statue, kissed the tip of that great phallus, caressed it lasciviously.

“I invoke you, Priapus! Give me favor, form, beauty! Give me delight. For you are I, and I am you. Your name is mine, and mine is yours.”

There was a tremendous demoniacal clatter of drumming. Faustus knew what that meant: one of the worshipers was mounting the statue of the god. Menandros, avidly staring, leaned much too far forward. At this stage of the ceremony there was little risk that any of the impassioned celebrants would look upward and catch a glimpse of him, but there was some danger that he might go tumbling down into the cavern below and land amongst them. It had been known to happen. Death was the penalty for any man caught spying on the rites of the adherents of Priapus. Faustus reached for him; but Maximilianus had already caught him and was tugging him back.

Though covert surveillance of these rites was forbidden, men were not entirely excluded from the chapel. Faustus knew that five or six stalwart slaves were lined up along the wall of the chapel in the shadows behind the statue. Soon the priestess of Priapus would give the signal and the orgy would begin.

They practically needed to drag Menandros away. He crouched by the rim of the aperture like a small boy greedy to discover the intimate secrets of womankind, and even after the event had gone on and on long beyond the point where even the most curious of men should have been sated by the sight, Menandros wanted to see more. Faustus was baffled by this strange hunger of his. He could barely remember a time when any of what was taking
place down there had been new and unfamiliar to him, and it was hard to understand Menandros's passionate curiosity over so ordinary a matter as orgiastic copulation. The court of the Emperor Justinianus, Faustus thought, must place an extraordinarily high value on chastity and propriety. But that was not what Faustus had been told.

At last they got the ambassador out of there and they went on to the next place on his list, the pool of the Baptai. “I'll wait for you here,” said Faustus, as they arrived at the steep spiraling stairway that led down into the pit of utter blackness where the rites of this cult of immersion occurred. “I'm getting too fat and slow for that much clambering.”

It was, he knew, an enchanting place: the smooth-walled rock-hewn chambers bedecked with iridescent glass mosaics in white and red and blue, brightened even further by splashes and touches of vivid golden paint, the scenes of Diana at the hunt, of cooing doves, of cupids swimming among swans, of voluptuous nymphs, of rampant satyrs. But the air was damp and heavy, the interminable downward spiral of the narrow, slippery stone steps would be hard on his aging legs, and the final taxing stage of the long descent, the one that went from the chamber of the mosaics to the fathomless black pool that lay at the lowest level, was beyond all doubt much too much for him. And of course the mere thought of the ascent afterward was utterly appalling.

So he waited. A tinkling trickle of laughter drifted up to him out of the darkness. The goddess Bendis of Thrace was the deity worshiped here, a coarse lank-haired demon whose devotees were utterly shameless, and at any hour of the day or night one generally could find a service in progress, a ritual that involved the usual sort of orgiastic stuff enlivened by a climactic baptismal plunge into the icy pool, where Bendis lurked to provide absolution for sins just committed and encouragement for those yet to come. This was no secret cult. All were welcome here. But
the mysteries of the cult of Bendis were no longer mysterious to Faustus. He had had baptism in those freezing waters often enough for one lifetime; he did not seek it again. And the skillful ministrations of his Numidian playmate Oalathea were gratification enough for his diminishing lusts these days.