by Jeremy Reed
‘We have to accept’, he said, ‘if we let go now we concede to Alexander. He has the Army’s support.’
Symiamira turned around to face him, eyes full on and powered up. She walked straight at him and continued to shunt him all the way to the bed, where he collapsed under her weight. Her mouth sealed his like a cork in a bottle. He gave himself up to her rooting tongue as it choreographed a circular groove around his mouth. He forced her hair back from his face and tried to struggle free. The boy she had taken to bed last night continued in his drunken sleep, oblivious to everything. Glancing at him Heliogabalus thought he looked dead, except for the lift of his chest in breathing.
He managed to stall Symiamira’s passion and push her face away by placing a hand on each cheek and looking directly into her eyes. He sat up in order to gain space and positioned his hands on her shoulders. ‘I’m ordered to appear with Alexander at the calends,’ he said, ‘as a sign that we’re joint rulers. If I don’t comply with this request then they’ll come for us.’ He watched Symiamira look away, as though by refusing to believe him she would succeed in erasing the danger. She sat back from him, still disappointed at his unwillingness to have sex but aware now of the reality of the situation.
He shook her to get her attention before telling her of his newly formulated plan to set up a community on Capri. ‘We’d be safe there,’ he said. ‘As well as becoming the leaders of a new race, we’d attract to the island the world’s most beautiful youth, and all of them gay. Why shouldn’t we strike out in this direction and create an alternative society?’
Symiamira looked at him suspiciously, until the idea clicked. ‘Do you mean that buying us out would be the condition? That we’d setde and let Antony take over?’
‘Sort of. I would agree to take a less active role in government and live in exile like Tiberius. I had in mind his old hiding place.’
Symiamira played with the thought, committing it to her system like a substance of which she was unsure. He half expected her to come back at him with suicide as the only resolution to their dilemma. He didn’t tell her that his sexuality was the root cause of military hostility. He had read his own graffiti epitaphs too often to doubt the reasons for his unpopularity. Heliogabalus the bitch. The faggot pretender. The bath-house slut. He had memorized each ugly inscription and had retaliated by a smear campaign against his cousin. He had been warned by Syrian astrologers that he would meet a violent end, and their prophecy came back to him now, as his mother answered him simply by curling up and taking refuge against his side.
He lay next to her, the day’s incidents coming back at him like a traffic accident to which he had been a spectator. He had never felt so alone in his life. He was wanted by nobody, not even by himself. As he understood events, the Army had taken Alexander into their custody so as to ensure his safety. He knew for sure that his mother’s sister Julia Mamea was a party to the plot, for she wanted to see her child Alexander as emperor, but he felt unwilling to pursue this line of investigation. He was too confused to think properly and kept hoping against the odds that the situation would reverse itself. It was the shock of it all that he couldn’t shift. It was inside him like an air-pocket that kept buffeting his nerves. He knew he could never again be the person he was two or three hours ago, and that the cutting of his privileges was like halving his identity.
Eventually he got up and decided on a course of action. He had to do something to make amends, and he decided he would start by throwing Hierocles out of the palace. That whole scene had started to get on his nerves, and now was the time to end it. Determined to act on his resolve, he left his mother and went in search of Hierocles. He found him sashaying around the dining-room on high heels, a bottle in one hand and a blond wig in the other. He looked like someone trying to drink himself sober as the agenda for the day.
Heliogabalus came up behind him and steadied him by placing his hands on his shoulders. ‘Hierocles, you’ve got to go,’ he said, gently but with authority. ‘Otherwise they’ll kill us sooner than even you predicted. Get out and stay out until times are safe. And take all the trash with you. All the rent you have brought here from the baths. They’ve all got to go.’
When Hierocles said nothing he shook him. It was tragic seeing the man he loved in this condition. His face was bloated, his nose swollen and rashed with broken blood vessels, his eyes shot with scarlet fleck. Heliogabalus stood looking at him, fighting back the tears and holding his lover out on a long arm, appalled by what he was seeing.
Suddenly Hierocles broke free of his hold, positioned the blond wig for effect and looked him dead level in the eyes. ‘I hate you,’ he said vehemently, his voice shot through with malice. ‘You’ll die as you deserve. Like a dog.’
The force of his lover’s hatred cut him deep. He felt the blow like somebody randomly slashing piano strings with a blade. He should have stayed calm, should have held back from confrontation, but instead he screamed, ‘Get out of here at once. All of you. It’s an ultimatum. If you don’t go I’ll have my guards remove you. Do you hear?’
He didn’t wait for an answer. He stormed out, glad of what he had done. He knew there would be no going back on his word and that his marriage to Hierocles was over. He had torn up its gossamer threads like ripping apart a spider’s web.
He went straight back to his mother and found her dressed and making up in front of a mirror. Her expression was serious, and she seemed to be busy making plans in her head. She was deep in thought as she filed a fingernail, his concentration having him believe it was the thought she was addressing, rather than the crescent of red gloss applied to her left thumb.
‘You’re right,’ she said without turning around. ‘We must stay at all costs. If we run at the first threat they’ll know we’re frightened. And that way we’ll never negotiate terms.’
He noticed that the boy who had still been asleep in her bed ten minutes ago had disappeared without a trace. Clearly his mother had thought it wise not to exacerbate matters by drawing attention to her untiring sexual conquests.
‘But it means a divided power,’ he argued. ‘The Senate support Alexander, and I’ll be without any ruling voice. At least there is dignity in exile. Tiberius found it.’
‘It’s not something to consider now,’ Symiamira said. ‘Let’s wait and see how events unfold. I’ll speak to our advisers.’
‘The astrologers have warned me I’ll meet a violent end,’ he said, hoping the awareness of it would have his mother reconsider. ‘The calends are coming up and, as I told you, I have to make a gesture of goodwill and appear with Alexander on the occasion.’
He stood there, ashamed of the concessions he was making, his hatred of brute machismo urging him to show defiance. He wasn’t going to be the wall against which the Army pissed. His tolerance, his generosity to the poor and the lotteries he had introduced, conferring huge prizes on the winners, had made him popular with the people. They liked him even for his extravagance, and he felt confident in their support. His enemies were largely the common soldiers, whose continuous demands for money he had of necessity silenced. Unable to get their own way they had taken to using his sexuality as a form of blackmail. He knew from experience the false sense of camaraderie that men derived from feeling part of the sexual norm. It was a bogus security to which they clung in the interests of identity. His own education by Syrian priests had placed an emphasis on the androgynous unity of male and female as the desired ideal. For them, gender was considered to be without boundaries, and he had been genuinely shocked to encounter prejudice in Rome and to find himself the victim of persistent homophobia. It wasn’t how he had imagined life to be in the capital, and intolerance had forced him into the corner in which he now found himself.
He watched his mother pencil a blue horizontal eyebrow, meticulous to the last detail, ensuring that that the line was perfectly straight. He knew that if his mother’s thoughts were on death, then they would equally be on how to present herself at her best, should the m
oment arise.
‘You’re right, of course,’ he said. ‘We’ll stay. It would be crazy to leave, and anyhow there’s nowhere to go. An enemy is someone who gets under the skin and knows everything right down to the details of your blood group. There’s no chance of running away.’
He took the little box containing poison out of his pocket and toyed with it, knowing full well he had caught her eye. The gesture was an indication of how he felt rather than an attempt to initiate a suicide pact. If necessary, that would come later, as a final act of freedom, the ultimate push into the unknowable dark.
‘That’s our only certain death,’ his mother commented, seeing the container in his hand. ‘I’m prepared for it if you are.’
He wasn’t, and he attributed his reluctance to fear. He had read in Seutonius of how Nero, finding it impossible to put the blade through himself, had to be assisted by aides.
He thought of all he had hoped for as emperor and of the temples he had raised to his god. Nothing withstood the ravages of time, least of all the human body. Everything material had a disposable audit. Love he considered the exception, as its qualities were subjective, and if anything of him lived on he hoped it would be because of this emotion.
He was lost in his thoughts when a servant came into the room carrying a written order for his attention. It was a demand that he should appear at the barracks at noon the next day, in the company of Alexander, to review the troops. They were clearly trying to force his hand, and he guessed the object of the exercise was to point up ridicule at his effeminacy. He had no purchase on his cousin’s masculine bearing and his ability to acquit himself well in the eyes of the Army. The whole thing was a set-up to show him at a disadvantage, and he resented the politics behind such a scheme. While he couldn’t be forced to attend, the failure to do so would play directly into his rival’s hands.
For no reason at all, he suddenly let go the whole misery of his being and started to sing. He stood facing his mother and in his trained tenor’s voice sang an aria extracted from one of Ovid’s tales. When he sang, he visualized the notes, shading one part blue, another yellow, another red. Singing for him was like creating a sonic rainbow, one that bled words into sound in a controlled stream of molecular collisions. It was the chance to enter so deep into himself that he forgot his troubles. He watched his mother put down her eye-pencil and transfer her attention to his impromptu performance. He had done this in childhood, back home in Syria, sung to alleviate a situation when it looked impossible, and now he was doing it again. And, as he sang, so his resolve to remain emperor returned. He had no doubt in his mind that he was going to have his way even if it cost him his life.
His song finished, he sat down and wrote a reply on impulse. He ordered on command that the Senate should disband and all its members leave the city. He said that he no longer recognized them as the governing body but as supporters of a faction opposed to the emperor. They were to be gone by dawn, and the punishment for remaining behind was death. He repeated that he was not going to tolerate a conspiracy against Caesar, and singled out the names of Ulpian the jurist and Silvinus the rhetorician as foremost amongst the offenders. With his typically soft touch, he offered them exile rather than execution, preferring to keep his reign clean of blood to the end should signing the document prove, in effect, his suicide.
He briefly showed the letter to Symiamira and decided to have it delivered immediately. He wanted, for once, to assert his authority rather than reflect on the consequences of doing so. He didn’t hold out much hope other than in the possibility of shocking the Senate and the Army into the realization that in supporting Alexander they were in fact undermining the emperor’s sovereignty. He knew that by the time the people rose in his support it would be too late. The community were always the last to be consulted about events concerning them, so that a people’s rebellion was invariably a reaction to something that had happened, rather than a determining force in its prevention.
He felt incredibly tired, almost as if his nerves had been broken up like a road. Symiamira, in contrast, looked surprisingly calm now that a decision had been made and busied herself arranging a number of gold vases on a bedside table. Looking at her attachment to things reinforced his belief that it would be wrong for them to go into exile. He didn’t want her to have to change, and he knew her to be incapable of denying herself the least pleasure. He was more resolved than ever that, if they were to die, then it would be in the manner of how they had lived.
There was nothing to do now but wait. He had made the only real legislative demand of his reign. It amounted to a vindication of his rights to be sole emperor, and he hoped it would generate terror in the government. It gave him huge satisfaction to think he might, if things succeeded according to plan, force the Senate out of their corporate stranglehold, even if it was only for a short time. They and the interests they represented were what he hated most about the empire’s burnt-out constitution.
He quickly changed into his toga praetexta, as a means of feeling more secure about his decision to take authority, and tried to distract himself by thinking of his achievements as emperor rather than allow his desperation to make a mental inventory of his defects. He talked himself through his various successes and reminded himself that he had been responsible for the completion of the Antonine baths as well as the Thermae Varianae on the Aventine and having built temples and a vast hall for the women’s senate on the Quirinal. He had given generously to the people, preferring almost every walk of life to that of the autocratic ruling classes with whom he was supposed to mix. The latter had never forgiven him his origins, his religion or the towers he had built in the city according to the instructions of Syrian priests, one of which had a courtyard paved with gold as a symbol of his solar birth.
He didn’t know how long he had sat there with his mother, only that a messenger returned at some point with news that the Senate were in flight from the city. They had taken him on his word and fled, and only the refractory Sabinus, a man of consular rank, had remained behind and resolutely refused to budge. He accepted the news gladly but remained suspicious, convinced that their exodus was mere show and that secretly they would be plotting a coup.
He hoped, too, that Hierocles and his entourage would be gone by now, although the pain of separation cried out in his heart like a small trapped animal. He went out of the room to look, part of him dreading to find the apartment empty, the familiar scent of his lover everywhere and his possessions gone. He knew there would be a comeback on his decision and that regret would force him to reconsider. Their history had been one of salvageable tantrums, glass splinters of jealousy, holocaustal tempers, but beneath it all they had known a love that at times had run deep like an underground river. They had faced hostility together, taken disapproval square on the jaw and somehow survived.
He knew from the quiet of the corridor as he approached it that Hierocles had gone. The usual shrieks of camp hysteria igniting the place were absent and, for once, this particular wing of the palace was silent. He hadn’t known it like this before, and he had the sudden fear that his entire staff had deserted him and left him to be butchered by the Army.
Of course the rooms had been looted. Hierocles and his circle had made off with all the valuables. He should have seen this coming and had Antony supervise their leave-taking, but at the time he had been too shocked. It wasn’t his own losses he regretted, it was more his mother’s anger he feared at his having mismanaged the whole affair. Most of the jewellery and the silver and gold objects they had stolen were her family heirlooms, and he dreaded having to tell her of the theft. He recognized it as still another instance of the payback he invited by mixing with lowlife. As he stood contemplating the stripped rooms, he couldn’t decide whether it was his sexuality that compelled him to search out such people or if it wasn’t that he himself shared their essentially underworld nature. Hierocles had clearly cut and run and decided to avenge himself by turning the apartment upside down. Expensive s
ilks had been slashed, screens kicked over and books by Heliogabalus’ favourites ripped up and kicked across the floor. The rooms had been devastated, and as he sorted through the debris, lifting with his foot a string of pearls that had belonged around the neck of a bust of Dionysus, he realized the tremendous force of a lover’s hatred. Threatened with loss of material privileges, Hierocles had gone on a cyclonic thrash to compensate for being rejected. Glasses and mirrors had been smashed across the marble floors. Heliogabalus stood there, fascinated by the trail of maniacal destruction Hierocles had left in his wake. He cut his finger on a needle of glass as he picked up a gold frame he had once given Hierocles as a gift. The scrolled jeweller’s work depicted ambiguously sexed Cupids and had been a present at the time of their audaciously staged marriage.
He felt totally alone in the biggest city in the world, at the hub of an empire over which he presided. He had everything and nothing, as he stomped through the litter, expecting at any moment to be surprised and run through by a member of his own guard. He couldn’t believe he had really brought all this on himself. He was too young to account for the reckless extravagance by which he had lived. Being emperor had seemed as much a delusion as a reality. He had acted out the part without thought for the consequences. Everything had been at his disposal, and he had torn the building down to get at the contents. He had crossed the city once too often in carriages drawn by lions – or sometimes by naked boys. He had worn dresses and openly disparaged the Army. He had spent too much time perfecting sauces and too little on government. His extravagance had known no boundaries. He had driven to the Forum through streets sanded with gold dust and had funded the lives of the city’s rent boys. He saw himself as he had addressed them in a dockside bath-house, promising them everything, including his patronage. His personal advisers had been encouraged to drag up outrageously and to adopt the appearance of women.