‘Well then?’
‘If you care so much, I’ll tell you what I know. But we should go back to the marble altar. Everyone we need to talk about is sculpted there.’
‘And how can we do that?’
‘I can ask Taurus. He trusts us. You do realize that whatever we do, we’re being watched day and night by people that we can’t even see, right?’
Armin nodded. His mind had already returned to those figures carved in the marble, the incredible beauty they expressed, and he seemed to barely notice when Flavus commented, ‘It would take centuries before we were capable of making something that magnificent.’
Nonetheless, he answered, ‘We’re warriors.’
‘What, they’re not?’ replied Flavus with a sarcastic smile.
THE BOYS COULD scarcely believe it when they were given permission the next day to move freely around the City, which was crawling with people who’d come for one of the many religious or political celebrations. They took advantage of the opportunity to see parts of the City they were unfamiliar with. What impressed them the most was the Circus Maximus. They could never have imagined a structure of those proportions: how many people could fit onto those seating tiers? As many as there were in an entire Germanic tribe, for sure. They were even able to watch as a dozen or more chariots, each drawn by four horses, practised for the races. It was the most exciting thing they’d ever witnessed and their hearts beat quicker at the sight. After each lap, a large bronze dolphin-shaped counter was lowered by manoeuvring a hook. Every dolphin was in reality a fountain that directed its spray either upwards or downwards. Trumpets blared out from inside the enormous space, echoing on both sides. The track was covered with crushed stone that increased the traction of the chariot wheels; they watched the drivers gripping hard at the reins as the four steeds tore off at great speed. Once they reached the end of the long side of the track and began the turn, they had to vie for the innermost lane which would shorten the course and give them the best chance at winning.
Since what they were watching was only practice, the charioteers abstained from the most extreme racing strategies so they wouldn’t risk damaging the chariots or laming the horses before the actual competition, when the winning driver would be crowned in front of an immense, delirious crowd.
‘I’m sure that it won’t be long before they bring us here to watch a real race and that’s when we’ll see what they’re genuinely capable of. A race in the great circus of Rome! After that it’ll be the gladiators. They say it’s the most cruel, terrible show in the whole world, where men fight each other to the death for the sole reason of entertaining the spectators,’ mused Flavus.
‘Just thinking about it disgusts me,’ replied Armin. ‘I hope they don’t force us. But nowadays there’s not a big city anywhere that doesn’t have an amphitheatre of its own, unfortunately. Even in Germania.’
‘Yes,’ repeated Flavus, without letting any emotion into his voice, ‘even in Germania.’
They finally reached their destination: the monumental altar ordered by Emperor Augustus to celebrate the peace he had restored by ending the civil wars, the Ara Pacis. Flavus pointed out the images of both Tiberius and his wife. ‘This is Julia. She’s the only daughter of the emperor and, as you can see, she’s beautiful, even in marble. Tiberius, General Drusus’s brother, is the son of Livia, who had him with her first husband.’
Armin asked again, ‘And where is Tiberius now?’
‘On an island, between Greece and Asia. He leads a secluded life and rarely sees anyone; he writes letters to maintain his relationships. They say that he has long solitary walks on the island beaches, but that he still spends time training. He’s always been very strong; a formidable soldier. But he’s a strange man anyway. When the Romans want to punish someone they send them to a little island in the middle of the sea. He went there of his own free will.’
‘Why?’
Flavus brushed Julia’s marble face. ‘Because of her. Because of Julia. Now that we’re alone I can tell you the whole story. When she was widowed of her second husband, Agrippa, a very powerful man, her father Augustus decided to give her to Tiberius Claudius as his wife. Remember what I told you? Tiberius is the son of Livia, who is Augustus’s wife.
‘When Julia was still married to Agrippa, she had children with him, including two beautiful sons who are their grandfather’s pride and joy. They’re his own flesh and blood, you see, born of his daughter and of his best friend, Agrippa. See, here they are: this is Lucius and this is Gaius, and the figure with his head covered by his toga is their father, Agrippa.’
From outside they could hear the cries of the boatmen sailing up the Tiber with the day’s catch, mixed with the din of the carts transporting every sort of ware and provisions for the capital of the known world. But the unnatural silence which reigned inside the great altar room contrasted with the lifelike quality of the figures sculpted in marble. They were so convincing that it felt like you could hear the steady hum of their conversations. Army commanders, priests, the great ladies of the imperial house, babes and children who one day would become powerful like their fathers and uncles, and like their grandfather, who held the world in his hands.
Flavus roused himself from his thoughts for a moment, and then went on: ‘So Tiberius – that is, Julia’s third husband – had always enjoyed great fame for his military prowess. He is always at the forefront of any fight, has won countless battles in a great number of places . . . Everyone knew that he was the true defender of the Empire after Agrippa’s death but he was repeatedly seeing inexperienced, incapable younger men being favoured for succession in his place. Meanwhile Julia, his wife, had become exasperated at having to comply with reasons of state: at being married off to men chosen by her father and continuously having their children. She wanted to live her own life, spend her time with the high society – poets, artists, philosophers, actors – and to have love affairs with them if it struck her fancy. Above all, to play out her passion for the only true love of her life—’
Armin interrupted him. ‘Come on. It’s not possible that you know all these things.’
‘I told you, your Latin is terrible. I’m getting better and better at it, and Diodorus has even taken me under his wing; he’s the one who repeats all the whispers and rumours of what’s going on among the high-powered here in Rome. I think he gets more of a kick telling me this stuff than I do listening.’
‘So is that why Tiberius Claudius is in some kind of exile on an island in the southern sea?’
‘Wouldn’t that be enough for you? He’s the greatest soldier of the Empire, the commander of the armies of the north, and his wife’s behaviour has turned him into everybody’s fool.’
‘Maybe he deserved it.’
‘I would say the opposite,’ shot back Flavus. ‘I think he’s a good man. He was forced to marry Julia. He was in love with his own wife. I’ve heard that if he sees her, even at a distance, he can’t hold back his tears.’
‘I can’t believe that such a powerful man has any real feelings, apart from the desire for more power. And you heard that from Diodorus?’
‘Well, it’s not like he told me all of this at once. It’s only every now and then, when he’s in the mood to gossip. Actually, it’s funny, when he talks about Julia – and he always calls her “beautiful Julia” – it’s like he doesn’t dare to say what he knows. When he stops talking, it’s not because he’s run out of information, it’s because he’s reluctant to talk about it. Who am I in his eyes anyway? Just one more boy he’s responsible for tutoring, and a “barbarian” to boot. I’m convinced that his silences are hiding some big secret. So big he can’t even admit it to himself. But we really need to get going now; it’s time to get back to the Aventine.’
They walked back just as the sun was setting behind the hills and the shadows began to spread through the City. When they crossed the gardens, it was almost dark, but they were not afraid. They kept talking as they walked: Flavus in Latin, A
rmin in Germanic.
‘Why won’t you speak our language with me?’ asked Armin.
‘You know it’s forbidden. And that’s the real reason I know Latin better than you: I respect the rules. It’s better all round. Latin is our language now. It lets me express ideas and feelings for which there aren’t any words in our language. We’ll never forget our own language, so let’s save it to use it when we need it; when we don’t want them to understand us. But let’s live as though we’ve forgotten it.’
A rustling interrupted them. In a heartbeat, both had their hands on their daggers and had stepped apart to face the threat. It was a huge Hermundur, emerging from a laurel bush like a bear from the woods. His grey wolf’s eyes were framed by tattoos. They recognized him as one of the auxiliaries who had escorted them to Rome from Germania.
‘What are you doing here?’ demanded Armin in his native language.
‘I have a message for you from your father, powerful Sigmer.’
‘Our father!’ repeated the boys in a sigh as they resheathed their knives. The giant bared his white teeth, shook his head slightly and brought a finger to his lips. The first part of the message was made up of seven words, pronounced in his own dialect. The look the brothers shot one another was full of confusion – who could understand his guttural mumbling? The Hermundur must have noticed their dismay, for when he spoke again it was in Germanic: ‘ “The first who understands is authorized to reveal it, but if he prefers to keep silence, so be it.” These are the words of your father.’
He slipped away at once, leaving no time for the boys to recover from their shock. They made their way in silence, walking slowly down the gravel path that led to the atrium of the house. The only sound to be heard was that of a drop of water slowly falling into a basin, marking the flow of time.
‘What’s that?’ asked Flavus, taking a step back.
‘A hydraulic clock. This morning it wasn’t there.’
‘So what time is it?’ asked Flavus again.
‘The first hour of the first guard shift. You can tell from those notches on the inside of the basin. See? You can even feel them with your fingers in the dark.’
They reached the peristyle and Armin spoke up again: ‘Did you get what he said first?’
‘You can understand the Hermundur if you watch the movement of his lips. Did you?’
‘No, it was too dark.’
‘Me neither.
In truth, each suspected that the other had understood just fine, but was not ready to share what he’d heard, not yet.
‘If the horseman that you saw galloping out of the fog in Ravenna were to ride by in front of us right now, would you recognize him?’ asked Armin.
‘No.’
‘I think you’d be able to recognize him even in the dark, but that you don’t want to say so.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Flavus. ‘Everyone has their own ghosts.’
9
‘THREE HEADS BETWEEN two bodies. She at centre of all, of life or death.’ The phrase was the result of Armin and Flavus consulting each other the next morning. Both boys had had a bad night, disturbed by receiving a message from their father and upset at not being able to interpret what seemed to be a silly riddle. In the meantime, all the memories of their childhood and youth had come flooding back, plunging them straight back into the forests of Germania.
In order to be certain of not influencing one another, each had written his own interpretation of what the Hermundur had muttered at first in his own dialect. They compared the tablets: the words were identical. If the message came from their father, was it referring to Germania? But no, both brothers felt that the phrase had to refer more to their current situation than to their past.
But how were they to get at the meaning of such a message? Was it something that concerned them personally? Was it something that their father had heard from General Drusus? But, since the commander hadn’t been alive for a long time now, except in the minds of his wife, his brother Tiberius and Primus Pilus Centurion Marcus Taurus, it was evident that they needed to look hic et nunc, said Flavus in the end, flaunting his Latin with the expression for ‘here and now’.
‘Hic et nunc,’ replied Armin, without missing a beat.
They were sitting on the edge of a fountain of water burbling from the mouth of a bronze dolphin held in the hands of a young Triton inside a round basin made of red marble. Cornelius, the gardener, was raking up fallen twigs just a few steps away.
‘Three heads between two bodies, she at the centre. We have to figure out what “she” refers to, first of all,’ continued Armin.
‘You mean who. “She” has to be a person, not just a head,’ Flavus observed. ‘She’s between two bodies and she’s the centre of everything, of life or death.’
‘Fine. But heads between two bodies? That doesn’t make any sense at all.’
‘You know, maybe the Hermundur misunderstood and what we’re thinking is all wrong,’ mused Flavus, trying to break the spell that the apparently meaningless phrase had cast on them. ‘Or maybe we have to wait and we’ll be given more messages as time goes on that will complete the puzzle.’
‘No, you can’t start thinking that way. This phrase is all we’ve got to work with. Listen, each of us interpreted the Hermundur’s words on his own and we wrote them down separately, so we didn’t influence one another. Yet they matched perfectly. The words are clear, even though their meaning is not. But I have a hard time believing that they come from our father. I’ve never heard him say anything close to that.’
‘But we haven’t made a mistake. We both understood exactly the same thing.’
The western breeze carried with it the scent of lilies and jasmine, of grass just cut. Inside the villa, the servants were busy with spring cleaning. Marcus Taurus was away for a few days and Diodorus had claimed the extra hours as his own. They were studying Greek history, but also the recent history of the Republic. In order to help his pupils understand, their tutor had shown them a long strip of papyrus that reproduced the entire frieze of the Altar of Peace in which the members of the imperial family were sculpted. He’d taught them to recognize each one of them. It was evident that all students in Rome were meant to learn about the events of the last thirty years according to the version that had been laid down by her supreme ruler. It had occurred to both Armin and Flavus that nothing of this sort existed in their native land, details of which were becoming foggier in their minds as time passed. There were the songs of the bards, but that was entirely different.
What the Romans called ‘history’ was a narration that had all the semblance of truth, because it was based on the reports of people who had witnessed the events, or who had spoken with those who had. Most of the time, it was great men who wrote down the story of the events of which they themselves had been the protagonists, and no one would ever take it upon himself to contradict them, mostly because of the enormous esteem they enjoyed. That’s what Julius Caesar had done when he wrote about the Gallic Wars. If there were other versions of the facts that didn’t please those in power, they would slowly fade away and people ended up forgetting about them. So only one so-called truth remained.
Diodorus was very careful at explaining his way around history. He was only a freedman and he had no intention of saying anything that could be used against him, nor were the boys at liberty to question anything he taught them. One day he began to list the events that, according to his own interpretation, had led to the end of civil strife among the Romans. It had taken a war: the war of the man who everyone now called Caesar Augustus and who then was called Octavian, against his greatest adversary – Marcus Antonius – who had married an Egyptian queen called Cleopatra. Antony and Cleopatra were now dead, and Augustus remained the sole master of the entire world, although he had never expressly declared it. So, the conflict that had put an end to the civil wars was in itself a civil war – that is, Romans fighting against Romans. It certainly wasn’t easy to find the truth behind this
‘history’. But Diodorus also enlightened them as to why there was a good reason to study those facts: because a public commemoration of those very events was soon to take place, replete with parades, festivities and athletic competitions.
One evening as the two brothers were strolling along the river, admiring how the sinking sun was setting aflame the water and the statues on the temple of Asclepius on the Tiber Island, Armin suddenly said, ‘It’s not the meaning of those words that we have to figure out first. We have to find out who gave the message to the Hermundur so he could give it to us.’
‘Not our father?’ asked Flavus.
‘It may have been him, but I’m not so sure. Try to think backwards. Do you remember the phrase?’
‘Of course: three heads between two bodies, she at the centre of everything, of life or death.’
‘All right. Then forget about the Hermundur and think about the group of people with whom we have or have had a relationship. Besides our father, that would be Taurus, Diodorus, Germanicus . . . and the gardener, I guess, Cornelius. Am I forgetting anyone?’
‘Taurus’s two freedmen, Thiaminus and Privatus. But we’ve hardly even spoken to them,’ said Flavus.
‘Then let’s play another game. Take this tablet and write the name of the person who you think may have thought up such a phrase. Turn it over and pass it to me and I’ll do the same on the other side.’
It took just a few moments for the boys to write a name in the wax. Armin compared them. They’d both written the same name. Diodorus.
Curious about all the events that were being readied for the upcoming celebrations, and with that name in mind, Armin and Flavus crossed the river and the Campus Martius and set off on foot towards the Vatican Hill. Every now and then they would take off at a run, like that day when they’d been caught in the forest in Germania and taken into Marcus Taurus’s custody. They finally drew up short, as they had then, in front of a grandiose spectacle. There were thousands of labourers on the hill and they were digging an enormous reservoir one thousand eight hundred feet long and one thousand two hundred feet wide. It was later explained to them that when the festivities were scheduled to start, it would be filled with water from an aqueduct and used to simulate the Battle of Actium, in which Antony and Cleopatra had engaged Octavian in naval combat and had lost.
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