by Jeremy Reed
He listened to what was being said in a dream state. He had so often imagined himself as caesar that he feared the reality would be disillusioning. Part of him would have preferred to keep the fantasy safe rather than act on it. He could hear the rain outside giving over, perhaps as a sign, he told himself, that now really was the time for him to engage with Macrinus. He was bored by the military, caring more for the damage done to the sprays of lemon-scented mimosa and to the smashed torrent of pink camellia heads than he did for their strategies.
That night he went to his mother’s bed, determined to talk to her of death. It was not so much that he was afraid, it was more that he wanted to test his ideas on the subject against her own. He found her waiting for him in a purple see-through gown and had to dismiss her advances in the interests of conversation. It was not for nothing, he reminded himself, that his real name was Varius, indicating that he was not only the son of various men but that his mother was notoriously promiscuous.
Symiamira, not giving up on her intentions, lay beside him on a couch, her sinuous body forming the shape of an S placed on its side. He resented the fact that his mother considered her body to be her only instrument of expression. He knew from experience that if he coaxed a little of the story from her interior she would reveal an understanding of life that he had never counted on existing. Her reading of character, learned through her senses rather than her head, displayed a naive but profound ability to penetrate defences. He knew that when encouraged to give shape and value to her thoughts she possessed a surprising facility to point up the psychological traits in an individual’s behaviour. Her essential grittiness was not without subtlety, nor her hedonism without the ability to reflect on her life of reckless excess.
Now that the rains had lifted the heat was oppressive. He sat beside his mother, hardly knowing how to start. He wanted to tell her that ambition and death were one and the same and that the pursuit of office was correspondingly an invitation to die. It was not just Serge quoting Seneca on the subject that had triggered the impulse in him, it was the realization that he might die in the field. The priests of Emesa had assured him that to die in the pursuit of individual destiny was the only death acceptable to the gods; only he didn’t want to lose his life fronting an army he despised.
For weeks now the phrase ‘What can be better for me than to be heir to myself?’ had been coming into his mind, and he still had not succeeded in puzzling out the enigma. He decided to try it on his mother, who was in the process of getting drunk.
He assumed she was not listening, as she closed her eyes and seemed to be wanting to shut him out. Then suddenly, in a voice that seemed to belong to somebody else, she said very clearly, ‘Dry stones are not fetched from a stream. You will get to Rome unharmed, but the stones will return to the river.’ She sat up as abruptly, looked confused, and said, ‘Did I speak? Sometimes I have no knowledge of what I say or where it comes from. Don’t take my words too seriously.’
Heliogabalus looked away, his mind elsewhere. ‘What you have just told me is not unlike what I have read in Seneca, who says, “No good thing makes its possessor happy, unless his mind is reconciled to the possibility of loss.”’
‘Your life hasn’t begun yet,’ Symiamira said, by way of reassurance. She angled her foot in his lap, but he would not be drawn. He sat wondering why his individual role in life should be different from Serge’s or his mother’s or Julian’s, the blond boy who was his lover. Sex, he had discovered, was the gateway to an ecstatic union with death, but it offered him no significant clue to his identity. He assumed that nobody could explain to him the mystery of why he, a Syrian youth who had never seen Rome, should be in line to be its future emperor. If the secret was coded in his genome, then he doubted he would ever know. Like all those before him, he would turn the question over in the dark pockets before dawn or in snatches of self-reflection watching a sunset point up acute orange and vermilion.
His mother looked at him from a place that lacked all signposting. He was afraid that she was about to predict his imminent death, but instead she returned to drinking and laughed in a manner suggesting she had scared the thought away. ‘Men think only of their balls,’ she said tersely. ‘They attempt to squeeze the life out of themselves, together with their secrets.’
‘What are you trying to tell me, Mother?’ he asked, the catch in his voice causing her to look at him with concern.
‘That you have a rival in Gannys. He has his own plans to become emperor. If we are successful in our claim he will have to be killed.’
‘But he’s your lover,’ Heliogabalus said, shocked by the ruth-lessness of his mother’s scheming. That life appeared so cheap to her upended his beliefs in its sanctity. He felt suddenly like the casings had been torn from his nerves. In order to make his point he was tempted to walk out on her and on the idea of being emperor.
Symiamira tried again to trigger his sexual interest, but he pushed her away and stonewalled her attempts to coax him into conversation. He knew that if Gannys could be so easily disposed of then his own life would follow. What he wanted more than anything before he died was to know the sort of intense love that his friends had never experienced. That it would be with a man didn’t matter; in his mind the bond could only be heightened by the quality of likeness.
He could hear the noises of an army assembling out there in the night: men who were probably unaware of why or for whom they were fighting. Their needs, he knew, were the perennial ones of money, camaraderie and brutally perpetrated sex on the vulnerable. They would be paid with money derived from theft, and they in turn would commit grossly unsanctioned crimes. He had refused outright to study Tacitus’ Annals or any other martial accounts of the Roman Army’s remorseless war-machine. Armies had been consistemly liquidated, but an essentially genocidal residue survived and persisted. Scorched by the African sun, gored by stampeding elephants, eaten alive by cannibals, he knew the stories and how nothing ever succeeded in turning the Army around. They were rapacious to the point of fighting their own shadow.
He could sense his mother’s feelings of rejection. She got up from the bed and slipped a silk gown over the transparent one. Instead of returning to the couch, she went over to a lamp-lit corner of the room and arranged herself on a tondo of red cushions. She had shut herself up from words again, and her downturned mood showed in the way she narrowed her eyes at the glass.
He felt too vulnerable to risk being alienated from her at such a time. For all he knew, tonight could be their last together, and Serge’s teachings had impressed on him that animosity was the wrong state in which to die. He wanted to make it up and went over to her and bruised her mouth with his lips. He knew that his body language would communicate on a deeper level than words. He worked his tongue like a feeler into her palate and withdrew before he got caught up in the erotics of her response. He could feel her mood change instantly, registering how he had succeeded in throwing the right switch.
‘I’ll follow your advice,’ he said, aware of the compromise he was making. ‘From what I’ve read in the histories, being emperor is an unenviable thing.’
‘You must never say that to anyone,’ Symiamira warned him, her expression so serious that it jolted him out of self-reflection. ‘Men everywhere will envy you your position. Your cousin Alexander, although only a child, has an equal right to rule. Take what is yours, and together we will face the consequences.’
Although he knew he was too young to find a similar basis of trust in himself, Heliogabalus invariably turned to Seneca’s thoughts as a consoling source of back-up. The line ‘I shall never be frightened when the last hour comes; I am already prepared and do not plan a whole day ahead’ had worked its way into his mind while his mother was talking. Philosophy gave him a pivot and provided a necessary window between himself and reality.
He left his mother to sleep. The alcohol had kicked in, and she lay face-down on the cushions. He placed his hand briefly in hers, knowing that at some stage of the
night Gannys or one of his equally duplicitous associates would force himself on her.
There were lights on all over the villa as he left his mother’s apartment and went in the direction of his own in search of Julian. Their brief affair, tempered by mistrust and the fear of being found out, would, he knew, end with his departure for Rome. Julian, with his privileged background, his fleckless green eyes and worrying nature, was studying law, and would doubtless in time become a respected barrister. Three years older than Heliogabalus, and with his father having taken up a consular appointment in Syria, Julian was determined to make his future in Rome.
When Heliogabalus went into his room he could smell Julian’s presence. He knew he would be hiding under the sheets, his skin slightly musty with pheromones and a scent that reminded him of the complex notes of vetiver as they came up in the masseur’s green-tiled parlour.
Julian pushed his head out from his hiding place as he heard Heliogabalus enter. He emerged like a diver, his hair tousled from friction with the sheets. His quizzical stare took in Heliogabalus with a mixture of fear and longing. He propped himself up on his elbows, his naked torso catching in the light, a leopard tattooed across his right shoulder.
Heliogabalus quickly undressed. Julian had always made him feel like a commoner, taking every opportunity to demean Heliogabalus’ family. He had in his assured, logical manner – and without intending to cause offence – stripped apart Heliogabalus’ claim to be an Antonine. The line had ended with Geta, he insisted, the younger son of Septimius Severus.
When Heliogabalus attempted to fit his body to Julian’s he could sense the resistance. Julian was somewhere else tonight and was not going to give himself without first expressing his feelings. He knew from experience that coming up against Julian’s body when he was in this state was like attempting to break into a mirror. He could make no purchase on its cold surface.
‘So you’re really going?’ Julian said in an accusing tone. ‘You must know it will all end badly. Reading Suetonius should tell you that. You can’t go to Rome as an impostor.’
‘Who is to say I’m that?’ Heliogabalus said defensively. ‘Besides, Macrinus has to be defeated first. You make it sound too easy.’
‘You don’t really believe that your father was Antoninus Caracalla?’ Julian persisted. ‘You know as I do that he was Sextus Varius Marcellus.You yourself once told me so.’
Heliogabalus swam an arm out across Julian’s chest. He could feel his friend’s heart turning over like a motor in its thoracic groove. The thought that it would stop one day caused him pain, in the way that acknowledging love demanded a corresponding acceptance of death. Julian would die, but whatever had passed between them would, he knew, continue to exist in some form of post-human context.
‘I have to prove myself to the soldiers first,’ Heliogabalus said. ‘It’s the part I’d rather do without. But if I do survive to be acclaimed emperor, then surely you can find a way to join me in Rome. It doesn’t have to be an end.’
‘Never,’ Julian replied, the force of his conviction allowing for no argument.
Heliogabalus felt the hurt go deep. He flinched inwardly. He took the refusal to be a judgement on the incongruous figure he would cut as emperor. Julian would not wish to associate with bad blood, even if the person was caesar. He lay there listening to him breathe in the dark, their sexual energies put on hold by bad feeling. He could sense Julian weighing resentment against desire, while his own cock remained obstinately hard, its impulses untamed by their differences of opinion. He knew that he should let go and turn over and have Julian make things right through the annihilative powers of sex.
Uncertain how Julian would respond, but willing to take the risk, Heliogabalus went under the sheets and took Julian’s urgently demonstrative cock in his mouth. He began fellating it, working on the frets like a guitarist playing the instrument with his tongue. Julian lay back and abandoned himself to Heliogabalus’ sensually improvised rhythm. He knew how to create little triggerings in his friend, as the first premonitory hints of orgasm. But this time he intended to leave Julian with no more than the anticipation of coming and in this way encourage his lover to expand his repertoire of erotic play.
Heliogabalus disengaged and worked his head back to the air, leaving Julian with the excruciating ache of arrested orgasm.
‘I’ll miss you,’ he found himself saying, as their bodies interlocked in the dark. But, even in searching out Julian’s lips, he felt an underlying sadness that he knew would heal in time and be converted to a sense of painless loss. He had come to think of Julian, like he did of the mimosa, as a transient, intoxicatingly beautiful event in his life that belonged to a certain moment. The idea of him growing old or diseased seemed intolerable.
Aroused, Julian tried to flip him on his stomach, but he resisted, preferring to remain with his lips and to hold to their fierce, interrogative vocabulary. There was the enigmatic taste of Julian’s roots on his tongue, that mixed primal scents with the less definable signature of his psychic being. As they struggled to find deeper access to each other, he was aware of how easily love could be transformed into murder. The barely concealed animosity that lived as the subtext to Julian’s feelings for him was starting to be answered by his own sense of wounded pride. He resented being thought of as inferior on account of his illegitimacy. He knew it within him that he had a perfect right to be emperor, and the sleight given him by his friend caused him to be brutal in biting the tissue along Julian’s nether lip. Both manoeuvred for the ascendant position, but neither were going to concede to being fucked. The woman in him had taken offence and closed down the routes by which he usually gave himself with such abandon. Tonight he was going to resist Julian and suppress the fantasy he entertained of himself as a serviceable rent boy: a butch-haired faggot working the bath-houses in the interests of achieving in calculable numbers.
A frustrated Julian fought free of his embrace and sat up coldly. ‘Let’s forget it,’ he said. ‘There’s too much friction between us.’
Julian’s instant cooling shook him. He wanted to live on in his friend’s memory like a bruised emotion that took colour when it rained or when a particular mood invited reflection. First love, he had been told, never died; but already he felt a tincture of hate for his resentful partner. It was a hatred so inseparable from love that he felt confused by the dual emotion.
‘You’ll end up nobody,’ Julian bitched, digging at Heliogabalus’ insecurity. ‘You see, sex will be the end of us both. We’ll be forced to marry, and the compromise will show. They’11 laugh at you if you get to Rome.’
Heliogabalus moved away from Julian and turned to face the opposite wall. This time he felt irremediably hurt and was determined to reject any attempts at reconciliation. Julian’s assertion that he would end up nobody had gone in deep like a twist of wire. If nothing else he had a purpose now: to prove Julian wrong in his spiteful prediction. He would be somebody and nothing less than emperor.
‘I think you should go home,’ he said, as a way of trying to defuse the situation. ‘I need to sleep and have an early start. Let’s not end on a bitter note.’
Julian got up abruptly, like somebody running back out of a sea that had proved too cold. He jumped off the bed, his erection still standing in line with his navel. His petulance showed in the truculent way he stood, the left hand angled to his hip, his chin raised as a token of rejection. His stormy attitude, whether genuine or affected, was the invitation to a potentially recriminative scene.
Heliogabalus made no attempt to have his friend reconsider. He watched him put on his clothes with the sort of indignant haste provided by a blow-out temper. Julian’s shattered hair was standing up spiky like a dahlia. Every cell of him was on alert, waiting for an apology that never came and which Heliogabalus was determined to withhold.
‘Shit on you,’ Julian seethed, as he fussed with his shoes. ‘You’ll be sorry for kicking me out.’
Heliogabalus remained silent. He wante
d at all costs to avoid reproaching his friend. He knew he would suffer later for having said nothing and that the minute Julian left he would wish him back, but his mind was made up.
Julian made an attempt to correct his hair, picked up the two books he had brought with him and without turning around hurried out of the room.
Heliogabalus stayed a long time without moving. He settled back on the pillows, stunned by his friend’s abrupt departure. It seemed to him that Julian had taken a chunk of the air with him in leaving, for the room was oppressively hot and he had difficulty in breathing. The atmosphere was still charged with the twitchiness of their recent hostilities. He wondered how he would be able to sleep in the aftermath of what had happened. He blamed Julian for having worked on his insecurity at a time when he was most vulnerable. Tonight, faced with the unnerving prospects of going to war, he had needed his unconditional support. That he had been denied it had come as a shocking reminder of the powers of betrayal. He felt as though a nerve had been cut in his body. He had trusted Julian, who in turn had repaid him by walking out with the calculated malice of someone intent on wrecking his emotions.
He wanted on impulse to run to his mother’s room and take refuge in her bed. Julian had succeeded in scaring up the sleepy chimeras garaged in his unconscious. They stared out like fat pythons sensing feeding time in a vivarium. Their fangs came searching along his spinal chord, jabbing him with current. In his state of panic he imagined himself being ridiculed by the Army, fumbling in his mount, jeered at for his unashamedly bleached hair. There was so much he had need of keeping under cover. He was acutely aware of his difference and of the need to manage it until such time as he could safely own to his true identity. The men outside in the dark, who had gathered together to logo his name as the last of the Antonines, were of a very different nature. He wanted nothing to do with their coarse masculinity and the values by which they lived. He would go out to join them, carrying a wound he could share with no one.