Titus, dedicating the amphitheater constructed by his father, the Deified Vespasian, on land once occupied by Nero’s private palace, had decreed that it belonged to the people of Rome, and all, down to the humblest, were to have their place in it. There was even a terrace above the third public tier to give standing room to the few slaves and foreigners too lowly to receive one of the 45,000 entrance tokens distributed each day.
Crowded into the doorways that led to the third tier of the public seating, a half century of seamen in the naval green tunics of the Misenum Fleet jostled each other for a view of the arena floor, while Correus Julianus, resplendent in the golden oak leaves of a corona civica and the gilded parade uniform of a senior centurion, his vine staff tucked under his arm, leaned in an arch beside a statue of Athena Nike and watched them. The man who didn’t behave himself would rue the day, his expression said plainly.
To the bored peacetime sailors of the Misenum Fleet, a week’s duty in the emperor’s grand new amphitheater was a high treat, theirs merely for the price of running the awnings out on their rigging when the sun became too bright for comfort – an easy enough task for a man used to doing the same thing on a pitching ship in a thunderstorm. They shoved at each other for places in the doorways or scrambled up the stairs to the upper terrace to push the lowly out of theirs.
“Centurion Julianus, sir!” A short, sandy-haired seaman with a scar on his nose bobbed up in front of him and saluted, and Correus glared at him. “There’s a bit of a fight up top, sir – Lucan and that silly Greek and somebody’s slave!”
Correus hefted his vine staff and made an exasperated noise in the back of his throat. He headed for the stairs.
By the time he had sorted things out, to the accompaniment of cheers and whistles from the rest of the gallery, Seamen Lucan and Demetrios found themselves deprived of the rest of their tour of arena duty, and the slave, loudly protesting that he belonged to Marius Vettius and the centurion had better watch out, had been told to sit down and pipe down.
“And if there’s another squawk from up here, whether it’s my men or not, I’ll have the whole gallery cleared,” Correus snapped.
Across the arena, on the top tier, he could see more flashes of naval green, the other half century under the watchful eye of Caritius. The captain of the Misenum flagship was having a fine time, Correus thought. When the emperor had personally requested their expert advice and assistance in planning the naval spectacle and mock battle that was to be the highlight of the day’s events, Captain Caritius had set himself to the project with the enthusiasm of an impresario. Correus had gone kicking and dragging his feet until his brother, Flavius, who was staff aide to the emperor, told him to keep his opinions to himself if he didn’t want a hitherto shining career nipped in the bud.
“How’d you like to grow a long gray beard at Misenum?” was the way Flavius had put it.
Correus gave a final baleful stare of admonition to the top gallery and returned moodily to his post in the shadow of Athena Nike’s gilded wings.
* * *
Most of the house of Appius Julianus were at the games today. The master himself had remained at home, claiming bad health (Appius Julianus was never fool enough to insult an emperor), but Julia and Lucius Paulinus were below in the senators’ boxes, and Flavius and his wife were in the emperor’s own box. And in the public tiers the free staff of the house of Appius had found seating.
Emer, dressed in her best, her red hair shining, was squeezed in between her husband and old Diulius. Diulius had driven in the Circus Maximus itself in his young days and could never resist a spectacle. The heady excitement of the crowd and the danger were in his blood. Emer’s husband, Forst, merely liked to watch men fight, with the scientific appreciation of a man who had done much of it. He was a German from beyond the Rhenus, tall and blond and big boned, with the fairness of the North. He wore the plain tunic and sandals of a Roman freedman, but his face sported a drooping mustache, and his pale hair was long, pinned in an odd, exotic knot at the side of his head. He had been a weapons master to the sons of Appius before he had been freed. Now he was a head horseman, settled, married, and master of the stock that the estate bred for sale to the army. He lounged in his seat and wrapped a long arm around Emer as a roar went up from the crowd.
The gladiators swaggered up from the chambers under the floor, marching smartly to the harsh music of drum and trumpet. They made a circuit of the arena, while a little rain of flowers and coins showered down on them from patrician admirers in the marble boxes of the first tier. They smiled their thanks with a raffish gaiety that made the crowd roar out its approval. The spectators had no love for a man whose face showed his fear, and later their approval would matter greatly. The music reached its height and stopped, and there was a sudden hush like an indrawn breath as the gladiators formed up in ranks before the emperor’s marble throne to give the old salute:
Ave, Caesar. Morituri te salutamus.
We who are about to die… There was an extra spice to that greeting today, in the knowledge that for this spectacle alone, a hundred death fights had been purchased. These were not the hopeless and condemned, doomed to be slaughtered wholesale, but the highly trained warriors of the gladiators’ schools, expensive pieces of property. It was a mark of the emperor’s free spending that of the two hundred smiling swordsmen who stood with arms raised before him, half would never leave the white sands of the arena with the breath still in them… unless the crowd should choose to spare them. The spectators shivered, eyes bright, and waited.
In his garlanded box, the emperor Titus Caesar Vespasianus Augustus – a stocky, bull-necked figure with a gilded laurel wreath set somewhat incongruously on his carefully curled hair – sat to receive the gladiators’ salute. Titus’s head, like that of his father, Vespasian, always looked as if it belonged under a helmet. Beside him, amid the flutter of gold and purple ribbons and the sweet scent of rose-and-lily garlands, was the emperor’s brother, Domitian, his own dark curls adorned with flowers and his face bored and slightly surly. He shifted his feet restlessly under his consul’s robes, and his fingers tapped the marble arm of his chair in a maddening rhythm, until in irritation the emperor slapped his own hand down on his chair.
Domitian shrugged and began to toss dice with the cronies who attended him. A young blond boy with the face of a marble Apollo stood behind his chair, draped over Domitian’s shoulders like a cloak. Titus winced. He had put his own vices behind him when he took the purple, and he found it irritating that his brother could not manage to do likewise. Although, Titus thought grimly, he preferred the blond boy to the dubious company of Marius Vettius and his ilk.
Vettius, cheerfully swilling the emperor’s best wine and throwing dice with Domitian while the gladiators’ parade went by, was an influence that Domitian could have done without. In the manner of sandal lickers throughout the ages, Vettius’s stocks-in-trade were the lavish compliment and the outstretched hand. He sang Domitian’s praises to his face, encouraged him to drink too much and spend too freely, and feathered his own nest with the posts that such tactics gained him. His latest plum was a prefecture in the City Shipping Offices.
Titus swung his head around and glared at him and noted with satisfaction that Vettius lowered his voice and dropped down a little in his seat. It would have given Titus great pleasure to drop Vettius off the Capitoline, but enough blood had flowed during the civil wars before Vespasian took the purple to give Titus nightmares even now. He had marked his own accession with a public vow to Jupiter Capitolinus that if there were no concrete proof, there would be no executions. He had since wondered occasionally if that had been wise, but one didn’t go back on a vow, not of that sort, without looking over his shoulder ever after.
Titus shrugged and turned his attention back to the arena, gravely raising his hand in answering salute to the gladiators’ ranks. If he were lucky, someone else might see fit to get rid of Vettius for him. The emperor wouldn’t overly object to Vettiu
s’s blood on someone else’s hands. Young Flavius Julianus, maybe, he thought with a half smile, catching sight of his aide’s aquiline face and crisp dark curls under the golden glint of a corona aurea. “For bravery above that normally expected of a Roman soldier…” Flavius had paid for that corona aurea: The long, slim hands resting on the marble railing of the emperor’s box had only four fingers each. The other two had stayed behind him in West Britain, hacked off with a dagger by a British chieftain who wanted to know a military secret. Flavius’s brother – up there with his seamen and glowering at the spectacle, no doubt, Titus thought with a quick grin – had got a corona civica for pulling Flavius out of that, and they were both currently in very good odor with the army command – which meant Titus. Titus glanced again at Flavius. He was facing the arena, but his eyes were slued sideways so that Vettius was in his line of vision. He had the expression of someone keeping an eye on a snake.
The dark-haired girl beside Flavius put a hand on his arm, and Flavius turned his eyes away from Vettius.
“Dear, you’ve got your eyes all turned around like an owl’s. What are you looking at?”
“Owls turn their heads, sweet, not their eyes,” Flavius said absently, but he gave his wife his attention.
“Well, whatever, it makes you look very odd from this side.” Aemelia slipped an arm through his. “And you’ll miss the show. What fun to sit in the emperor’s box!” She giggled. “Half my friends are giving me dirty looks, and just look at the expression on Papa’s face!”
Flavius turned his head toward the senators’ boxes on their right, where the plump face and round blue eyes of his father-in-law, Aemelius, radiated satisfaction as he admired his daughter’s dark beauty in the emperor’s own box. Beside the senator, his wife, Valeria Lucilla, was enjoying herself hugely, being condescending to an old acquaintance whose daughter, a tall, sallow girl two paces behind her, showed no signs of catching any husband, much less a staff aide to the emperor.
“Your vanity is showing,” Flavius said, teasing. Aemelia laughed and nodded, but it was fun, and the emperor leaned forward and patted her hand.
“You must come to the games with us more often, my dear,” Titus said, in an avuncular tone carefully older than his years in case anyone should get the wrong ideas about his fondness for his aide’s young wife. Titus had never cared for schoolgirls, and it would be a shame to start a scandal. Aemelia was much too unknowing to deal with it. “You make the scenery much prettier.” He waved a slave over to refill her wine cup and push a standing tray of sweets and iced fruit a little closer to her reach.
Aemelia gave him a smile and a sigh of content. “Are they going to start soon?”
“Very shortly,” Titus said. “Flavius, you may cease watching my brother and his unfortunate friends. No one is going to attempt my assassination at a public spectacle. I am not Gaius Caligula. Watch the games instead – unless you share your brother’s views on the arena?” he added with a raised eyebrow. A man’s opinions were his own, but the crowd wouldn’t care for it if they thought the emperor and his staff found the public’s amusements beneath them. And a City mob got out of hand all too easily.
“Not at all, sir,” Flavius smiled. “I’m quite enjoying myself.” He turned to the arena again, arms crossed on the railing. Unlike his half brother, Correus, who always got sick to his stomach, or their father, Appius, who merely disapproved, Flavius liked the harsh combat of the arena, the blood, and the strident music. He had long since ceased to wonder if that said something unpleasant about himself. Although Seneca had claimed that the games rotted the soul, Titus’s court had no choice but to attend, so it was just as well to like them.
Aemelia also turned her face, a dark rose among the rose-and-lily garlands, to the arena floor. She hadn’t been allowed to attend the games until she was married, and they never seemed quite real to her. In truth she hadn’t the imagination to see the cold-eyed warriors below her as real men or the doomed and condemned as a higher order than that of the beasts roaring in their cages beneath the floor, so she enjoyed herself with the happy pleasure of a theatergoer. And afterward there would be the dinner party, which six senators and their wives, a poet and a philosopher and the emperor himself had promised to attend. Aemelia gave another little sigh of pleasure. Life had become very exciting since Titus had risen to the purple.
* * *
Athena Nike’s face was splashed with red from the red canvas of the awning. One more month, Correus thought. I can take one more month of this. He made himself look down at the arena as the gladiators lifted their swords and the crowd noise swelled around him, a hungry sound, half-animal. Maybe Ygerna was right, and he was closer kin in the soul to Flavius than he had thought. Maybe it would be too easy to be lost in the blood and the harsh cry of the trumpets. Maybe that was what he was afraid of.
II Charon
The crowd had stiffened to attention, lips parted, eyes eager now for the first fight. A sword-and-shield man circled warily about his opponent – a brawny man, half-naked, armed with Neptune’s fishing net and a long-handled trident that ended in three gleaming tines. That rapt attention would only last a few fights, the swordsman knew. He was lucky to be the first, while the crowd was still fresh and appreciative, eager to spare the warrior who acquitted himself well. Later, after five or six more fights, the other combatants would fight ten and twelve at a time, and the crowd would be eating sweets and gossiping, bored again, interested only in the blood and not the skill. The man who went down then would stay down.
“The man with the sword,” Emer said. “He’s limping, I think.”
Forst narrowed his eyes. “He has a bad ankle,” he said, watching the swordsman. “Just enough to slow him. He is going to lose. He’s playing to the crowd, I think.”
“Aye.” Diulius, the wiry old man on Emer’s other side, gave her a gap-toothed grin. “He’s givin’ ’em a good show and prayin’ for a thumbs-up when the net man gets him.” He settled in to watch.
Emer wished she hadn’t mentioned it. It was one thing to watch the pageantry of the games for the excitement of it. It was another to be suddenly put inside a gladiator’s skin. She put her hand on her husband’s arm, not wanting to watch now when that snaking net reached out for the limping man’s feet. “I think everyone within fifty miles of Rome is here.” She waved a hand at the jammed tiers rising above the arena floor, from the marble boxes of the nobility to the standing space in the top galleries.
“That should please the emperor,” Forst said, watching the swordsman.
A bowlegged man balancing a tray of iced fruit came down the sloping corridor and through the crowd, shouting his wares in competition with the constantly roving vendors of sweets, cold drinks, seat cushions, and other comforts. Forst waved a long arm at him, and the man pushed his way through the seats to them. Forst bought two pears and handed Emer one, cold and dripping with melted ice. She bit into it hungrily while Forst complained to the bowlegged man about the price. That was understood, part of the ritual. The fruit seller departed, stuffing Forst’s coin into a grimy pouch.
Forst was as Roman now as a man like him was going to get, Emer thought, watching her husband. Only his long, knotted hair marked him for an oddity, and Emer suspected that he clung stubbornly to it because of that. Forst was not a man who liked to blend into the scenery. What had he been like, she wondered, before the war in Germany, before the slave collar, before Rome? Before her?
On the sand, the swordsman had gone down. The trident fighter’s net was tangled over the swordsman’s head and arms, and one leg was bent awkwardly under him. He lay twisting frantically in a pool of blue light, under the multicolored awning, until the trident man laid the bright sharp tines against his throat. The swordsman froze. The trident man turned toward the emperor’s box and bowed. He raised a hand, looking at the crowd, asking for life. Were the victor and victim friends? Emer wondered. A man couldn’t live and eat and fight with another in the gladiators’ school and not f
orm some kinship. She turned her eyes away, back to the crowd.
The emperor was debating, making much show of consulting the white-robed Vestals in their box, but it was the faces in the tiers that his eyes were assessing.
Emer found that she didn’t want to watch that, either, and moved her gaze along to the foreign dignitaries in their special box. They were sitting near the front of the long axis of the oval arena, where Emer could look down and almost face on to them. They were an exotic company, brightly clothed, with odd, barbaric jewelry and their own contingent of guards. Enormous black men in feather-crowned helmets glared impassively out over the heads of the foreign princes from the four corners of the box. They would be there as much to keep the foreign royalty in as to keep unauthorized troublemakers out, Emer suspected. The box’s occupants were client kings and chieftains of conquered lands, politely invited to spend some time in Rome. It was unlikely that any of them would go home again. They could make too much trouble at home. And it pleased Rome’s citizens to see evidence of success in her foreign wars.
Each had his own entourage about him, slaves and a woman or two, and small boys with fans. There was a table overloaded with food. They are pets, Emer thought, and then put a hand to her mouth. There was a red-haired man in a dark green shirt and trousers embroidered all over with gold thread. He sat near the center of the box. His mouth was half-hidden under a drooping mustache, and his hair was long and pinned into a knot at the side of his head.
“Forst.”
Forst raised his eyebrows at her inquiringly, his mouth full of pear.
The Emperor's Games Page 2