The demon’s feet worked anxiously against the apartment floor and he passed his long, tapered fingers through his silky hair. Clearly, having the opportunity to take a chance when he did not have to was unnerving him.
“Beat the odds,” he said to Worthy. “Beat the odds, and beat everyone. You know how we feel about making wagers. Wagers are sacred.”
“To your way of thinking they are,” said Worthy.
“The whole of creation is a crap shoot.”
“So your side says,” Mr. Worthy told him. “Taking chances is the ultimate temptation for your kind. What could be more alluring to the eternally damned than the reversal of fortune only luck can bring? You may have failed to win on ten million times ten million previous occasions, but there is always the possibility you might win the next hand, the next throw of the dice, thereby abolishing all the humiliations you have already endured. All that was will be made unreal, and an infinity of what-might-come-to-pass stretches out before you. Chance is the fallen’s version of salvation.”
The demon licked his thin lips and gripped his stool with both hands. A small tremor passed through his body while he experienced the rare sensation of struggling against his natural inclinations.
“Someday, you could wager everything on a single event,” said Banewill, speaking with some difficulty through labored breaths.
“Were I you, someday I might,” agreed Mr. Worthy. “Tonight we are contesting the soul of one lonely man.”
“Of two,” Banewill quickly insisted. “There’s the political consultant, too,” he added with unexpected emotional emphasis, as if he now cared deeply about that unnamed gentleman’s spirit.
“Two men, then,” said Mr. Worthy.
Maternus was not so ashamed of himself he that failed to follow the conversation the two unearthly beings were having a few feet from his bed. Like the demon, all at once he was also feeling the sweet agony only hope can visit upon anyone suffering on earth or below. Since the moment he had awakened from his rage in the Fourth Base until now, he had felt only the despair of knowing he was going to be returned to the gruesome tortures he had already suffered for eighteen centuries inside the iron cells of Hell’s seventh cycle. Watching the demon agonize over whether or not to accept the angel’s proposition, he felt an awkward flickering within himself. Plainly, Mr. Worthy was manipulating Banewill into an arrangement the reasoning portion of the demon’s psyche did not wish to partake of. Perhaps the Roman’s future was not yet lost. Perhaps he also had the chance to win everything, in spite of past setbacks. That he was reduced to thinking — or rather hoping — in a pattern similar to that of the demon did not strike him as odd.
Banewill made a sweaty attempt at enunciating a reply to Worthy and for several seconds could only bob his chin and exhale the two words, “All right.” He needed to calm his respiration before he could utter the complete sentence: “All right, we can have a court martial.”
“Wonderful,” said Mr. Worthy. “What say you to three judges? Keep the proceedings simple. We on my side believe good things come in threes, don’t you know? Have you ever noticed, my evil friend, how fairy tales and dirty jokes are inevitably resolved after the third incident? ‘This one’s too hot. This one’s too cold. This one’s just right.’ The mind starts looking for the end after three. There’s something embedded in the number, the way pi is embedded in a circle. Three is the simplest musical cadence. Do-re-me. One can’t have a completed cadence with only two notes, can you? Do-re… But add the third note, and the symphony can end at any time.”
“Oh, stop,” murmured Banewill, his formerly proud voice breaking and perspiration cascading from his sharp chin like a waterfall. “I said I would do it. You don’t have to tease me with you pious banter. You and your kind shouldn’t be allowed to mock us. It’s unseemly, really it is. You’re supposed to be kind and uphold all of that boy scout-family-values crap. So I’m weak — big surprise. I’ve been damned forever. Like I’m going to learn from my experiences and some day become a better being. One would think that you, knowing everything about me, and knowing that you and the other winged suckers are going to triumph when the last dust settles would be enough to make you happy. No, you’ve got to rub it in.”
“I mock you out of my consideration for the humans,” said Mr. Worthy and sounded innocent, even while he was lying. “We have to make examples of you for the mortals’ benefit. Otherwise, how would they ever learn? Now then, I suppose I should let you choose the three judges. Go ahead, astonish me with your vile selections.”
“Why don’t you tell me whom I’m going to pick,” sighed the demon. “You already know.”
“Come on, Mr. Banewill,” said Mr. Worthy, pretending to be perturbed. “We have a human in the room with us. He can hear everything you say. What kind of example are you setting for him? You are still an immortal, well, a semi-immortal. There is that Judgment Day business for your type.”
“Right, bring that up. Just when I’d forgotten, as if it didn’t bother me to have that hanging over my head every minute.”
“My point is, Maternus here isn’t going to fear you anymore, not if he finds out what a whiner you are,” said Mr. Worthy. “Make you picks. I’ll act like I’m surprised.”
Banewill strove to compose himself. He rested his hands on his knees and took a series of deep breaths while he tried to think happy thoughts.
“Here we go,” he said upon raising himself from the stool.
The demon raised his left hand above his head and described an arc in the air above him, much as Mr. Worthy had done on previous occasions, except that Banewill moved his hand from left to right, the opposite direction from the angel. An arched doorway of white light appeared below the curved line he drew in the air, and through it plodded three figures who carried with them the stale smell of death and a whiff of sulphur. The first two men to tramp into Maternus’s apartment were dressed in the plain linen tunic and short britches of Roman soldiers. The third man — a plump but tall young man with unseemly pock marks on his face and arms — wore a long toga similar to Banewill’s. The three men looked as confused by their new surroundings as Maternus had been when he was first summoned from Hell. The balding head of the first man through the magical doorway told Maternus he was none other than old Marcellus, the once-trusted friend who had murdered him in the Circus Maximus. The ruddy complexion and blond Germanic hair of the second figure showed him to be Casio, the young soldier Maternus had left outside Rome and the one most responsible for betraying the conspiracy. The third man was no one Maternus knew; from the gold rings on both his hands and the purple on his toga, Maternus guessed he must be a nobleman of very high position, maybe a senator. Unlike the other two men, this third man did not recognize Maternus, either, and dared to look straight into the soldier’s face in the darkened room. In contrast to him, Casio and Marcellus chose to look at the floor.
“First up, straight from the ninth cycle of my home, subsection B, an area reserved for minor traitors,” announced Banewill, sounding like a carnival barker, “come Casio Germanus and Marcellus Pullo, the men who confounded you on that spring day long ago, your last one on earth, ape boy. Look upon ‘em and weep. While you were on level seven, they have been frozen in ice for the past eighteen hundred yards, a pitchfork toss from the boss’s own skating rink. There they suffered in exquisite, unrelenting pain, fat head, and it was entirely because of you.”
The two former comrades of the Roman did not respond. Their arms hung heavily at their sides, as if their limbs were weighed down by chains.
“Salvette, brothers,” said Maternus, half of him given over to rage at the sight of the two men he had cursed for ages, and half of him feeling a strange emotion the familiar sight of them evoked.
“Health to you, brother,” they both whispered, glancing at him briefly.
“Last, and by no means least, fresh from the mysterious spot known as Limbo,” continued Banewill in his announcer’s voice, “I bring you Lucius Aeli
us Aurelius Antoninus Germanicus Britainicus, etc., etc., emperor of Rome.”
“Commodus,” said Maternus aloud, looking for the first time up close at the man he had hated longer than anyone else. “He’s not like his coins or his statues. Why is he only in this Limbo place?” he asked of the angel and the demon, forgetting both the predicament he was in and his repeated vow not to lose his temper. “Surely justice would demand this filthy killer be sent to the lowest, most terrible dungeon of Hell.”
“Ooh,” cooed Banewill, “ape boy is teed off!”
“That the first full sentences you utter tonight are used to question our judgment speaks poorly of you,” said Mr. Worthy. “That your motive for saying them is the hatred you bear another human being demeans you still more.”
“Where am I? Why am I here?” asked the dead emperor, craning his thick neck to look at the ceiling. “Did you see the owl?” he said directly to Maternus. “Did you? They say one was at the window of my bedroom the night I was strangled. In Germania that month an eagle laid an egg containing no yolk and no white; it was only a shell. Put that with the owl, and what do you have? The end of the world, that’s what. You look like my father,” he said to Mr. Worthy.
“He is in Limbo because he is, as you might note, quite insane,” explained the angel to Maternus. “Yes, when he was young and knew what he was doing, he committed countless mortal sins. During the last six years of his life — and he was dead at thirty-one — Commodus suffered from what you called the German disease and what the moderns know as a form of syphilis. The poor man’s brain deteriorated to a confused jumble of electrochemical impulses no longer able to make choices for good or for evil. Thus he was beyond our judgment.”
“My father also talked a lot,” said Commodus to the angel. “You’re not him, though… Where is Narcissus? Marcia? People say I look like Hercules when I have my club. Do you know where my club is?” he asked Banewill.
“I wouldn’t have anything to do with a club that you would either carry or have you as a member,” sneered the demon.
“He killed plenty while he could still think,” said Maternus, opening and closing his powerful hands and wishing he had Commodus’s flabby throat within his grip. “The winter before our mutiny, he took the money the senate was to send to the frontier outposts and built a new wing onto his palace in Rome. The men in the Augustus Legion boiled their shoes that winter to eat in place of the meat they did not have. The women outside the walls of our camp killed their youngest children rather than watch them starve. This creature was then in Rome, where they say he dined on exotic predators like lions and tigers because he had a quack physician telling him such a diet would give him magical strength. The cost of a single wild animal would have fed the entire legion for a month.”
“Go ahead,” the demon goaded him, “give him the back of your hand, ape boy.”
“Quit this!” ordered the angel. “How you disappoint me, Maternus! You know your immortal soul is about to be judged, and yet you cannot stifle your primeval fury for even a few hours. Do you think we will let you get within a galaxy of Maria and her garden while you remain seething with rage? Banewill was right about you.”
“I am always right about this mortal trash,” inserted the demon.
“You’re a brute, nothing more,” continued Mr. Worthy. “Twenty-two years of unremitting slaughter, done out of habit and for the false glory with which you used to salve your easily injured pride, reduced you to a pile of meat armed with a sharpened blade. You are not worthy of my time.”
“For his amusement,” roared Maternus, pointing at Commodus and letting tears come from his eyes, “he hunted cripples with a bow and arrow as if they were rabbits running—”
“Enough!” demanded Mr. Worthy, and the white-robed angel lifted a single finger, causing Maternus’s mouth to stop as if it had bitten into steel. “Not another word spoken in anger,” cautioned Mr. Worthy, “or I will cast you headlong to damnation without a preliminary trial. You may proceed, sir,” he added to Banewill.
“I sort of like how this is going right now,” commented Banewill. “Couldn’t we just hold off until he says something really stupid and decides the matter for us?”
“You would be waiting for a very long time,” said Worthy. “Now proceed.”
The demon touched the floor in three places. From each spot he touched there arose a broad pillar of light. Using a means that can only be described as supernatural, Banewill positioned each of the three ‘judges’ atop a pillar so that every one of them looked down on Maternus, as those on the judicial bench look down on those trapped in the docket. Viewing them at that angle, Maternus could tell both Casio and Marcellus remained reluctant to look at him. Nor did they speak.
They are uncomfortable here, thought the Roman, and in the instant he had this small thought, the black cloud of rage receded slightly within him. “Perhaps they are ashamed of how they did me,” he said to himself. In his rage he had not reflected upon why thus far all his fury had been directed toward the fat, bewildered emperor rather than the two traitorous soldiers.
“Now I’m going up,” said the confused Commodus, gawking at everything with a new energy now that he was elevated. “I can’t see my house,” he said. “It’s on the Palatine. One can usually see it from everywhere in the city.”
“On second thought, would you terribly mind if I changed this one out for a different judge?” Banewill asked Worthy about the wide-eyed emperor. “I was unaware of how goofy he had become in his final years. I was busy spreading cholera in Bythinia when he started his tragic downward spiral and didn’t keep track of events in the capital as well as I should have. I’m thinking I might trade him in for something a little Borgia, but I could go Heliogalbus, should you want to keep a Roman theme.”
“You chose him, you have to keep him,” said the angel. “He won’t, in and of himself, derail your case. Insane people may not be evil, but they can do evil deeds. You may still appeal to him. Make the best use of him you can.”
“My soldiers used to put me on a high platform like this and let me shoot wild beasts with my arrows. And sometimes criminals,” recalled the emperor.
“Charming,” said Banewill. “I’ll bear that image in mind the next time I throw a party.”
Banewill put his hands behind his hips and paced the floor in front of the pillar containing Marcellus. His movements were similar to those he had seen television lawyers make when they were about to pounce upon a hapless witness.
“Mr. M,” began the demon. “May I call you Mr. M?”
“I suppose,” shrugged the weary man atop the pillar of light.
“Now, Mr. M,” said Banewill, “tell us, to the best of your recollection, where you were on the evening of May 23, 1957.”
“What?” asked Marcellus.
“You’re not funny,” said Mr. Worthy to the demon.
“I couldn’t help myself,” laughed Banewill. “So, tell us, Mr. M, what sort of a chap was Maternus when you and he were together? I am interested in your impressions you had of him during the more than two decades the two of you were together in the Eighth Legion.”
“He was a good enough sort, better than most,” said Marcellus. “He was cold on a man-to-man level, but was a first-rate commander of men,” he added, becoming more talkative and warmer to Maternus once he had broken his silence. “Maternus was as good a leader as our century ever had. He never beat anybody, save for a couple of thieves he caught taking food from the quartermasters. ‘Course he was crazy brave. Never flinched from a fight. He was a good planner once we got into the thick of things and a lot of others were losing their heads in panic. The men would have followed him anywhere. Most of them did, I suppose.”
“I move to strike that from the record!” protested Banewill. “It’s opinion and unrelated to the issue.”
“You can’t strike anything from the record,” said Mr. Worthy. “There is no record, and your question was unrelated to the issue. Maternus is her
e accused of losing his temper in the Fourth Base sports bar of lower downtown Denver, Colorado. We are not trying him for anything he did in the second century A.D.”
“I’m establishing a pattern of behavior, your honor,” asserted Banewill.
“Whom are you addressing?” asked the angel.
“You, I guess. If not you, I guess I’m talking to these guys on the light beams,” said Banewill.
“If they are the judges, why are you making them testify?” asked the angel.
“You’re the one who thought three was a good number,” relied Banewill. “Whom can I ask questions if not these dopes?”
“Ask me about the owl,” suggested Commodus.
“I’ll get to you later,” said Banewill. “Now, Mr. M, did this Maternus you see before you have difficulty controlling his anger back when you knew him?”
“He seldom took it out on us troopers,” said Marcellus. “He kept all his ill feelings for the officers and other toffs we had hanging around our camps.”
“Whom he hated,” said the demon.
“Not all of ‘em,” said Marcellus. “He hated mostly the new men what come up from Rome every spring, the ones that would stay a year, or as long as it took them to steal whatever they could in the province, and then hightail it back home to make room for another well-connected thief. He had a real issue with the Severan bunch we had in Lugdunensis. They were the ones what pushed him over the edge and got him to start the rebellion.”
“You are referring to the relatives of the future emperor, Septimus Severus,” noted the demon.
“He became emperor?! Poor Rome.”
“Septimus Severus,” sighed Banewill and paused with his hand over his heart while he thought happy thoughts about that bloodthirsty tyrant. “Oh, he was a naughty one, wasn’t he, Worthy? We’ve got him and all his kinsmen spinning about on spits down on levels four and seven, like so many Cornish hens in a rotisserie oven.”
“I know that name,” said Commodus.
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