Rome's Lost Son

by Robert Fabbri

  ‘There is only one god, so it follows that the rest do not exist.’

  ‘I’ve seen gods manifest. I’ve seen the goddess Sulis and the god Heylel take over the bodies of the dead and live.’

  ‘Heylel? He who was cast from God’s grace for his arrogance? He was not a god but an angel.’

  Vespasian had been bored by this continual theological discussion to which the King was subjecting him. ‘It’s the same thing: a supernatural being that has more power than a human obviously demands worship. Call Heylel what you like but I call him a god and I should know because I met him.’

  Izates had tutted and smiled benevolently as would a patient grammaticus at a talented but sadly misguided pupil.

  Vespasian had ignored the patronising gesture, aware that he had probably been a little sharper in his remarks than was good for a hostage; he tempered his voice. ‘The point is that Radamistus has no intention whatsoever of keeping his oath. It’s not about whether he believes in Ahura Mazda or not; it’s because he feels that the King of Armenia isn’t beholden to any agreement reached with a mere satrap of Nineveh.’

  ‘Ah! So we agree on what Radamistus will do?’

  ‘Yes, but not why he’ll do it.’ He had bitten his lip, striving to keep control of his growing annoyance.

  ‘So my lord has given me a way to show the world how righteous I am, a way to show the nobles like Babak who cling to the old gods of Assyria that I can be merciful but strong in my religion. By him giving you to me I can show my nobles that they should stop plotting against me and join me in the worship of the one true god and his prophet Yeshua.’

  Vespasian was now all attention; he did not like the direction that the conversation had just taken. ‘How can you do that with me?’ His voice was low and the words slow as he had looked into the King’s eyes, which shone with the happiness of an innocent child.

  ‘When Radamistus breaks his word your life is forfeit. I can make a public show of my displeasure and devise some very nasty and long way to have you executed and then halfway through I can offer you mercy if you receive baptism into the faith. Which of course you’ll accept because, after all, who wouldn’t? When my nobles hear about that, they will be flocking to the river for submersion in Yeshua’s name. You see? Simple.’

  Vespasian gawped at the King, realising that the royal grip on reality was not as firm as it could be. ‘I am a proconsul of Rome; you can’t threaten me with execution and then try and force me to repudiate the religion of my ancestors without causing a serious incident.’

  Izates slapped Vespasian on the shoulder genially. ‘Nonsense, Vespasian; when Radamistus reneges on his oath I can do what I like with you.’

  ‘Babak told me that when that happens I’ll be thrown into a dungeon and kept there until Rome withdraws.’

  Izates looked startled. ‘He said that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He didn’t say that you would be executed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But that’s terrible.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Of course it is. If he told you that you would live then live you must; God would never approve of me making a point to my nobles based on dishonour. And the nobles in turn would point to me not keeping a promise like a follower of Assur, the old god of Assyria, who claims to continue to fight for kettu, the Truth. They would say that the one true god represents hitu, the False. That’s most aggrieving, terrible; he really did say that you would live?’

  By now Vespasian’s mouth gaped open in astonishment. ‘Yes, I’m afraid he did.’

  Izates rested his hand on Vespasian’s shoulder and gave him an understanding look. ‘Don’t apologise, it’s not your fault. Nothing you can do about it. How aggravating, most vexing, provoking in the extreme.’ He went off muttering to himself, leaving Vespasian looking after him, dumbstruck by his behaviour. A searing pain struck Vespasian and white light flashed across his inner vision; he felt himself slump down to the floor and hoped he would be allowed to stay there while the clearly bewildered King wrestled internally with what he could do to make Vespasian’s predicament spurious proof of some sort of bond with his god and tempt his courtiers away from Assur. He was disappointed; keeping his eyes shut, he felt himself being hauled up for a rapid series of blows to his stomach and ribs, knocking the wind from him. His knees collapsed again and as he fell he was vaguely aware of the King’s voice shouting. The beating stopped and Vespasian was left to contemplate his growing pain from cracked ribs and a bruised and swollen face.

  ‘I will gain nothing in the sight of God by giving him the choice between a prison cell and baptism,’ Izates announced. ‘How can I give him his life if I’m not going to take it? What will the nobles who refuse to join me in the one true faith think? They will not see magnanimity on my part nor will they see the power of God’s love but, rather, my own weakness as well as the desperation of a man who would do anything to regain his freedom. Take him away and send a message to the Emperor Claudius that Titus Flavius Vespasianus will stay excluded from the world until the lying usurper Radamistus is removed from the Armenian throne and Ummidius Quadratus, the Governor of Roman Syria, recalls his legions from that land. Until that happens he shall stay locked away and an Adiabene army will defend the Great King of Parthia’s honour against Roman aggression; there will be war in Armenia.’

  So Tryphaena finally has her wish, Vespasian thought, as he was dragged away across the smooth marble floor, and she will not press for peace to save him even if she did have the power to do so. He could well imagine that nobody in Rome would care much about his situation: Agrippina would revel in it as a by-product of securing her son on the imperial throne; Pallas would do nothing to jeopardise that succession; and Narcissus would most probably not spot the subtle danger of a Parthian war to his position until it was too late and Nero was emperor and he was executed.

  No, Vespasian found himself thinking, calmly, I am going to be here for some time; I can’t expect to be rescued so therefore don’t hope for it and I won’t be disappointed. Hope for nothing because from hopes dashed comes despair.

  And, as his gaolers dragged him down into the foundations of the ancient capital of Adiabene, deep into dark places excavated millennia before, deep into a realm where time has a different meaning, Vespasian fell back into his mind so that his thoughts and memories would cocoon him. Deep in the bowels of Arbela, Vespasian was locked into a cell that had seen countless years of suffering; a place where rats and nameless things held sway and time did nothing but gnaw. A realm of despair; and despair was the emotion that Vespasian knew he must protect himself from.

  There was little point in keeping his eyes open as there was rarely any light to see by. Every so often Vespasian heard a grating of a key in a lock and then the creak and crash of a heavy door opening and closing that would presage the arrival of the golden glow of a black-smoking torch held aloft by a gaoler to guide him and his mate down slime-slick steps. Vespasian knew this because he had a grille in his door and could see at an oblique angle along the narrow corridor. How often the gaolers visited, he did not know; it might have been twice a day, once a day or once every few days. It made no difference because he had lost the concept of days, nights, hours or months. In the depths of Arbela there was only a moment and that moment was now.

  The arrival of the gaolers would bring not only light but also sound. Low moans or cries for forgiveness, groans of pain or just plain mad gibbering always accompanied the gaolers’ progress down the corridor, attesting to what sort of condition the inmate, behind each of the many locked doors punctuating it, was in. Vespasian, however, never made a sound, not even when the grille in his door was unbolted and swung open. He knew the routine after the first couple of visits and thereafter did not need to communicate. He passed his refuse bowl out and its contents were slopped into the open sewer that ran the length of the corridor to drain away who knew where. The bowl was returned, unsluiced and stinking. He then had to pass two of hi
s other three possessions through the grille in turn: the first, a wooden jug, was returned filled with water that, by its taste, Vespasian knew would have been far from clear had he troubled to examine it. Second was his wooden food bowl, which came back containing a gruel of grains with the occasional morsel of gristle or bone floating in it. A stale loaf was then chucked through the grille as it was closed. With his sustenance safely grasped in each hand he would retire to his only other possession: a blanket that contained more life than the matted hair that clung to his groin, chest, face and head. Every so often some damp straw would be shoved through the hole to supplement the rotting heap upon which his fourth possession rested, but that was the only difference in the routine; he had no way of telling but he assumed that the straw arrived once a month as the second delivery was long enough after the first one for him to be surprised, having forgotten about it. He was unclear but he thought that he could remember at least a few more such deliveries; but what did it matter? What was sure was that even in this subterranean pit shielded from the sun by so much ancient stone it had got colder and Vespasian guessed that winter was approaching outside – if outside still existed.

  And that was just one of the many things with which he kept his mind busy at the slowest pace possible. It was not thoughts of escape or life after release that preoccupied him, but memories of life enjoyed and abstract questions to which there could be no answer or a multitude of answers. Slowly he dipped small hunks of bread into the gruel, stirring them with infinite care in the chasm-dark as he replayed scenes from his life, chewing his food methodically and at the speed of some drugged bovine; his expression, if it could have been seen, changing in accordance with the mood of each episode. Wincing, he recalled at great length the hideous bullying and beating that Sabinus had subjected him to as a child. A tender smile as he remembered the loving tutelage of his paternal grandmother, Tertulla, the woman who had raised him on her estate in Cosa, while his parents had been in Asia for seven years. Regret while the decline of his friend Caligula from a vibrant youth to crazed despot flickered in degenerating episodes across his inner eye. As his three children flashed through his mind he felt growing pride that culminated with Titus’ face, so much like his own, smiling at him, only to be dashed as Flavia appeared to make another demand. Contentment came in pulses as his passion for Caenis fired within him, although he was aware that he had to ration those thoughts as he sensed that masturbation in these circumstances could become addictive and sap what little strength remained to him.

  However, he could review without ardour the lessons he had learnt from Caenis in her privileged position at the heart of imperial politics. As secretary to the Lady Antonia, his benefactress before her disappointment with her grandson Caligula had led her to take her own life, Caenis had acquired the political skill to negotiate her way adroitly through the tangle of self-interest that prevailed within the ruling élite. She understood the importance of attaching oneself to one faction without distancing others. With her it was never personal, only business, and thus she had retained a position of influence after she had been freed in Antonia’s will. She had survived the remainder of Caligula’s reign and the turmoil following his assassination and Claudius’ elevation. During the subsequent years her ability to remain of use to both Pallas and Narcissus had enabled her to ride the infighting between them and, as secretary to first Narcissus and then Pallas, she had made a fortune by selling access to them; no one got to the seat of power other than through her. Vespasian might have smiled in the darkness as he remembered the shock that he felt when Caenis told him how she used her position to enrich herself; he might then have laughed as he recounted the ways that he had put that lesson to use since. Money was all important to him and through Caenis he had learnt how … the light again; how long had it been since the last visit that he remembered?

  This time there were more of them; how many he did not bother to count. Screams raged in one of the cells as his grille was opened. He went through the routine of the bowls and jug and was vaguely aware of a loud, wet thump as if a butcher’s cleaver had rent a joint. The wail and then piercing shrieks that followed it did a little more to impinge on his consciousness; the smell of burning flesh that accompanied them he barely noticed as he focused on the straw being thrust through the grille. So more time had passed in the world outside … if it still existed, that was.

  He refrained from burying his face in the straw because, although it was damp and old it was the freshest thing he could smell and reminded him of … no, he would not make that mistake again. The last and only time he had, despair had smiled at him, cold and grim, a false friend looming above him in his void of a cell, and he had felt the tears rise that, had they not been checked, would have driven him into the grasping arms of that fraud.

  He stirred the gruel to soften the bread; the shrieks had subsided into mournful groans but seemed now to be coming from the other end of the corridor, Vespasian noticed dully. He took a bite and chewed with deliberation. A different inmate in a different cell? A different moment, perhaps? Possibly, for the last delivery of straw seemed distant; but it was certainly not a different place as it was still dark and the gruel still tasted the same. But the air did feel warmer as if there was heat in the world outside … if that still existed.

  He nodded slowly to himself as he remembered that when the gruel had arrived he had been contemplating his uncle’s reaction to his wild theory concerning what had been predicted for him. He was aware that this was not the first time since he had been confined to this moment that he had been over that conversation and had mulled through the meaning of every sign, portent or auspicious happening concerned with what once may have been his destiny. That word meant nothing; where was destiny in a single moment? What room could there be for it? He was almost sure that when he had thought about these things during another part of this moment that he inhabited he had put all the clues together, but then he had discarded the conclusion because it had meant reaching forward; and that he would and could not do. But the memory of his uncle being unable to finish his sentences, to say ‘emperor’ or ‘purple’, because he felt the words would automatically make him too conspicuous, even though no one could hear them, pleased him as he stirred his gruel and took bites of bread without haste, immersed in thought.

  And thought threaded through his mind as his only sensation until, with a shock, he was tapped on the right shoulder. He opened his eyes and stared ahead, unseeing in the gloom, mystified as to how such contact could have come about. Then there it was again; but this time it was a double tap. He turned his head slowly but saw nothing; instead, he heard a distant sound, a sound that seemed to come from the world outside … if it really was still there. Then it died away, as if it had never been. But it had forced Vespasian to listen, to be aware of the world, to climb out from his inner tranquillity. He tensed in the dark, feeling a strange calmness as in the moments just before a storm breaking. Then he was tapped again but this time he realised that it was him doing the tapping: his right shoulder was knocking against the wall and it was knocking against the wall because the ground was moving. The sound from beyond rose again but this time it did not recede but grew, and it grew commensurately with the shaking of the earth until his senses were filled with only sound and movement. And then things started to clatter down from above, crashing onto the stone floor all around him, but he remained squatting where he was, squatting on his blanket on its pile of rancid straw; squatting where he always squatted as cries came from the cells down the corridor and the whole world shook with the anger of the gods below as they bellowed their wrath.

  The stillness was abrupt and for a moment all was quiet, even the wails of despair from the other cells. But the lull did not last for long and the next sound surprised Vespasian: it was a shout of exhilaration, a shout from close by. And then he remembered the story that Sabinus had told him, the one about the earthquake tumbling down the gates of the prison in which Paulus of Tarsus had been
incarcerated, and he wondered vaguely if his guardian god, Mars, had come to his aid in the same way that it had been said that Paulus’ god had come to his. With that thought he looked around and saw a sight that he had not seen since he had been placed in the moment in which he lived: he saw a dark grey rectangle in the otherwise Stygian black, he saw the dim outline of an open door. He stared at it incredulously until he was able to form a prayer in his head to Mars for his deliverance.

  Vespasian got to his unsteady feet and, with his hands outstretched before him, moved towards what to him seemed like a beacon of light. Through the doorway he went, stepping over the fallen door, and out into the corridor in which a few dim figures scampered towards the steps at the far end. The shouts of those not fortunate enough to have had their confinement ended by the earthquake were ignored by the lucky few fleeing up the steps and on through the broken door at the top and out into the dark beyond.

  Vespasian shuffled as fast as he could down a dark, debrisstrewn corridor, not knowing in which direction the outside world lay but aware where he had come from and wary of returning there.

  Dust stung his eyes and fallen masonry threatened his ankles but the earth’s convulsions had stilled and he felt a glimmer of hope, a thing that he had denied himself for so long, grow within him and he dared to think beyond the moment. He dared to think of escape.

  Suspecting that his fellow escapees had as little knowledge of the subterranean geography of Arbela as he, he decided not to follow them up a narrow spiral staircase and, instead, to use his own instincts. On he went turning left and then right, using his nose as a guide, sniffing for the cleaner air, always taking flights of steps up if they presented themselves and were not blocked.

  And then there was other life, other people and Vespasian realised that he must avoid them for he was vaguely aware that his appearance and stench would mark him for what he was. He pressed on with caution, ensuring that he never got too close to anyone, through what was evidently chaos in the aftermath of a massive shock, all the time heading up towards lighter, sweeter-smelling levels.