Roma

by Steven Saylor

  She ran to him. He stayed where he was, sitting stiffly upright and furrowing his brow. “Pinaria! What are you doing here? All the Vestals left yesterday.”

  She knelt beside his chair. “Yes, Pontifex Maximus, and I was to go with them. But I wanted to visit the Temple of Vesta, one last time. I meant to stay only a moment, but somehow—”

  “Shhhh! Do you hear?”

  Pinaria cocked her head. The sound was distant and vague at first, then grew closer and more distinct. It was the sound of men talking, punctuated by shouts and raucous laughter.

  “The Gauls,” whispered the Pontifex Maximus. “They’ve come at last!”

  “But Pontifex Maximus, why are you still here? Why have you not fled?”

  “Because some among us are still Romans. Flee the city? Never!”

  “But when the Gauls find you—”

  “I’m not the only one. Walk across the city and you’ll see the others who remain. Mostly old men, like myself; men who have never in their lives fled from an enemy and have no intention of doing so now. Nor will we cower inside our houses. Each of us has drawn a chair before his domicile, to sit and await whatever is to come, with our Roman dignity intact.”

  “But the Gauls are monsters! They’re giants, twice as big as normal men. They drink human blood, and sacrifice babies, and burn their victims alive!”

  “They may destroy my body, but they shall not rob me of my dignity. But listen, Pinaria—they’re drawing closer! You must flee!”

  “Where?”

  “Cross the street, quickly! Hide among the branches of that yew tree, and don’t make a sound, no matter what you see. Go!”

  Reluctantly, Pinaria left him. She hid herself just before a troop of Gauls came striding up the street, laughing and swinging their swords for the thrill of hearing the blades cut the air. They were indeed large, though not as gigantic as Pinaria had expected. Nor were they as ugly as she had thought; some might even be called handsome, despite their strangely braided hair and untrimmed beards.

  The Gauls saw the Pontifex Maximus and fell silent for a moment. They drew closer, peering at him curiously. He sat so still, with his hands on his knees and his eyes staring straight ahead, that perhaps they thought he was a painted statue. They slowly circled him, grunted to one another in their savage language, laughed, and pretended to poke at him with their swords. He did not react in any way; he did not even blink. At last, one of the Gauls—a redheaded giant from whom the others took orders—stooped down and peered at the Pontifex Maximus, eye to eye and nose to nose. He grabbed hold of the long white beard, grinned, and gave it a sharp tug.

  The reaction of the Pontifex Maximus was instant: He slapped the Gaul across the face. The crack of the blow echoed up and down the street. Pinaria gasped.

  The Gaul sprang back and roared. He drew a long sword and swung it in a circle in the air. The Pontifex Maximus did not move, but his face became as white as salt. With all his strength, the Gaul swung his blade against the neck of the Pontifex Maximus. There was a sickening sound, and then the priest’s head went flying through the air, the white beard trailing behind it like a comet’s tail. It landed in the street, bounced once, then rolled to a stop only a few steps from the place where Pinaria was hidden.

  Despite herself, she opened her mouth to scream, but from behind a hand slipped over her mouth, and an arm embraced her so tightly that she had no breath to cry out.

  The decapitated body of the Pontifex Maximus became a fountain of blood. The limbs jerked in a spastic fashion and the fingers madly twitched. The Gauls laughed and seemed refreshed by the rain of blood upon them. The sight was so horrible that Pinaria struggled wildly against the arms embracing her, desperate to flee, but the man held her fast. Against her back, she could feel that his heart was beating as rapidly as her own. The body of a Vestal was sacrosanct; Pinaria was not used to being touched. The sensation of being held so tightly was at once terrifying and strangely comforting.

  The Gauls knocked the body of the Pontifex Maximus from its chair, kicked it a few times, then began to move on. Their leader barked an order at one of his men, who ran back to fetch the severed head. The man came so close to Pinaria that he might easily have seen her, had he peered into the foliage of the yew tree, but he kept his eyes on the head as he grabbed it by the beard and ran off, swinging it over his head.

  The Gauls moved out of sight.

  Slowly, the man loosened his grip on Pinaria. She slipped free and spun around to see a youth no older than herself. He was dressed in a tattered tunic. His shoes were mere scraps of leather, so worn as to be hardly worth wearing. Pinaria glanced at the hand that had covered her mouth, then at the one that had touched her breast.

  “Where is your ring?” she said.

  The youth merely raised an eyebrow. He had bright blue eyes and was very handsome, despite a haircut so ragged that his fair hair poked this way and that like tufts of straw.

  “Your citizen’s ring?” demanded Pinaria. “Where is it?” Following a custom of the Greeks, every Roman citizen wore a ring, usually a simple band of iron. Sometimes such rings were carved with identifying initials or symbols; those who had cause to send letters or documents used their rings to impress their insignia on the sealing wax.

  “I don’t have a ring,” said the youth. “But I do have this.” He indicated an amulet that hung from a leather strap around his neck. It appeared to be made of lead, very crudely molded in the form of a male member with wings.

  Pinaria blanched. “You’re a slave, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “A slave dared to touch me!”

  The youth laughed. “Had you rather I’d let you cry out? Those Gauls would have found you, for sure, and then they’d have found me, as well. And since I’m prettier than you, who knows which of us they would have ravished? I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy becoming a plaything for one of those bloodthirsty giants.”

  Pinaria stared at him, dumbfounded. No man had ever spoken to her in such a crude fashion. Few slaves had ever spoken to her at all, except in response to her orders. No one had ever looked her in the eye and grinned at her in such a brazen way.

  The slave looked her up and down. “You must be a Vestal.”

  “I am!”

  “What are you still doing here? I should have thought you’d have left yesterday.”

  Pinaria was suddenly on the verge of tears. She drew a breath to steady herself. “You’re very impertinent.”

  “Is that what you’ll say to Brennus when he has you staked spread-eagled in the middle of the Forum, and the line of Gauls queued up to make your acquaintance runs all the way to the Aventine?”

  Pinaria slapped him across the face, then began to weep uncontrollably. The slave made no move to touch her, but stepped back and crossed his arms. “Have I frightened you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good! Because more Gauls will be here at any moment, and this is not a very good place to hide.”

  Pinaria fought back her tears. “I must get out of the city.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Then where can I go?”

  “Take my hand.”

  “What?”

  “More Gauls are coming. Can’t you hear them?”

  Pinaria listened. From nearby, she heard men braying a marching song in the ugly language of the Gauls. They sounded drunk.

  “My name is Pennatus, by the way. Now take my hand, and don’t let go. We’re going to run, very fast.”

  “Where?”

  “How should I know? We’ll trust the gods to guide us.”

  “The gods have left Roma,” said Pinaria, but she took his hand nonetheless.

  This way and that they ran, uphill and downhill, heading nowhere, striving only to avoid the Gauls. As more and more Gauls appeared, overrunning the city like rats overrunning a ship, eluding them became harder. Sometimes they were seen, and the Gauls cried out and ran after them, but each time they escaped. Pennat
us seemed to know each winding alley and every hole in every wall in the city.

  They saw many terrible things. Like the Pontifex Maximus, others had decided to greet the Gauls fearlessly, seated like statues before their houses. Some, like the Pontifex Maximus, had been beheaded. Others had been strangled or stabbed to death. Some had been hanged from trees.

  There seemed to be a surprising number of Romans in the city who, like Pinaria, had intended to flee but had failed to do so before the Gauls arrived. The city became a killing field; the Gauls were the hunters, the Romans the prey. Men were slaughtered and women and children were raped while Pinaria watched.

  Shops were looted. Buildings were set on fire. The Gauls gawked at the opulent houses on the Palatine, and gawked even more at the crude Hut of Romulus, preserved as a rustic monument in the midst of the city’s finest dwellings. Could such unfeeling, half-human creatures understand what the sacred hut represented? While Pinaria watched from the shadows, a group of drunken Gauls stood in a circle around the hut and urinated on it, whooping and making a contest of their desecration. No other sight that day offended Pinaria as deeply, or made her feel more desperately that the history of Roma was finished forever.

  The dreadful day seemed endless. At last, passing below the Tarpeian Rock, Pinaria and Pennatus heard voices calling from above. “Here! Up here! You’ll be safe if you can get to the top of the Capitoline!”

  Looking up, they saw tiny figures peering over the rock. The figures beckoned to them, then frantically pointed.

  “Gauls! Very near you, just behind that building! Run! Hurry! If you can get to the path that winds up the Capitoline—”

  Pinaria was too frightened to think, too weary to move. It was Pennatus who dragged her forward, holding her by the hand. Crossing the Forum, they were spotted by the same troop of Gauls who had beheaded the Pontifex Maximus; one of the giants still toted the priest’s head as a trophy, carrying it by the beard. Pinaria screamed. The Gauls laughed and ran after them.

  They came to the path which would take them to the top of Capitoline, the same route by which every triumphal procession reached the Temple of Jupiter. Drained by grief, immobilized by terror, Pinaria had reached the end of her endurance, yet, with Pennatus pulling her along, she seemed almost to fly up the winding path. Truly, she thought, the slave must have wings, as his name suggested, for how else was she being transported when her limbs had failed and her will was utterly spent?

  With its steep slopes, the Capitoline had always presented one of the most naturally defensible positions among the Seven Hills. Over the generations, an accretion of monuments and buildings linked by walls and ramparts had essentially made it into a fortress. The defenders at the top had only to fill a few openings and passageways with rubble to secure the perimeter. They were doing so even as Pennatus and Pinaria reached the top of the winding path.

  A narrow gap still remained amid the stones and bits of timber that were being hastily piled up to block the passage. A man stood in the breach, waving frantically. “The Gauls are right behind you!” he cried. Another Roman appeared atop the barrier, raised a bow, and let fly an arrow that very nearly parted Pinaria’s scalp. The buzzing of the arrow was followed by a scream, so close behind her that Pinaria flinched. The pursuers were very near, practically breathing on her neck.

  Pennatus rushed through the breach, pulling her behind him. She tripped on the rubble and scraped her shoulder against a jagged bit of wood as she passed through to safety.

  More arrows whizzed through the air, even as men rushed to fill in the breach. The archer gave a whoop of triumph. “They’re retreating! I got one in the eye, and another in the shoulder. Even giants turn tail and run if you show them who’s in charge.”

  The archer jumped down from the barricade, rattling his armor. He removed his helmet to reveal a clean-shaven face, bright green eyes, and a shock of black hair. He squared his broad shoulders and stood stiffly erect. “Gaius Fabius Dorso,” he announced in a deep voice, taking such pleasure in enunciating his name that the effect was almost comical. He glanced at her vestments. “Can it be possible that you’re one of the Vestals?”

  “My name is Pinaria,” she said, trying to steady her voice.

  “What’s this?” Dorso peered at her shoulder. The fabric of her gown had been torn. The pale flesh was marred by a scrape and bright red speckles of blood. He averted his eyes, conscious of the sanctity of her body. “How did such a thing happen? The slave must have treated you very carelessly! If he needs to be punished—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Pinaria. “The wound is nothing, and the slave saved my life.”

  She covered the exposed scrape with her hand and winced, suddenly aware of the pain. She looked at Pennatus. Perhaps he was not as handsome as she had thought; seeing him next to Gaius Fabius Dorso, he looked slightly ridiculous, with his badly cropped hair and shabby clothes. Nonetheless, when he grinned at her—such cheek, from a slave!—she could not help but return his smile. Her face grew hot and she lowered her eyes.

  “If you truly had wings, you could fly away from here,” said Pinaria. “If only…”

  She stood behind a rampart on the Capitoline, overlooking the Forum and the hills that surrounded it. Many days had passed since the coming of the Gauls. The sight of Roma occupied by savages—horrifying and bizarre at first, almost beyond comprehension—had now become commonplace. Rarely now did the beleaguered Romans atop the Capitoline hear the screams of some hapless citizen being rousted from a hiding place by the Gauls to be tortured and raped. Most of those in hiding had been discovered in the very first days of the occupation; a lucky few had made their way to the Capitoline. Nonetheless, the Gauls’ assaults upon the city itself continued, day after day. After a house was ransacked, the Gauls often set it on fire, apparently for no reason other than to delight in its destruction or to infuriate the Romans watching from the Capitoline. On this day, from all over the city, great plumes of smoke rose into the air. High above the hills, the smoke coalesced into a grey miasma that obscured the midsummer sun and turned midday into twilight.

  The handful of defenders atop the Capitoline—Gaius Fabius Dorso insisted that they think of themselves thus, and not as captives, for they were Romans and stood upon Roman soil—had, for the time being, enough to eat and drink. In the first days of the occupation, they stayed busy strengthening their defenses. They erected pickets, dug trenches, and even chipped away some of the hillsides to make them even steeper. So long as they kept watch day and night, their position was virtually impregnable. And yet, despair was always near. The sight of their beloved city being demolished house by house, the loss of all contact with those who had fled, the fear that the gods had abandoned them—these anxieties preyed on their waking thoughts and colored their nightmares.

  If only one had wings; if only one could fly away…

  Beside her, Pennatus smiled. He was always smiling, despite the grimness of their situation. He was quite unlike anyone Pinaria had ever encountered. Most of the slaves she had met were quiet and self-effacing, desirous of nothing except to go unnoticed. Most of the free men she had known were self-consciously deferential in her company, awkward or aloof. Pennatus was none of these things. He was constantly joking and making light of their situation, and her exalted status seemed to mean nothing to him. He appeared to be utterly without religious scruples or even religious belief. He often said things that went beyond sacrilege, not so much disparaging the gods as disavowing their existence.

  Pinaria had never met such a person, or even imagined that such a person could exist. It seemed there was nothing Pennatus feared to say to her. Sometimes she thought he must be flirting with her, though she had so little experience in such matters that she couldn’t quite tell. If only Foslia were with her, so that Pinaria might have someone to talk to about the unfamiliar feelings stirred in her by this peculiar slave!

  “For better or worse,” said Pennatus, “despite my name, I do not have, nor
have I ever had, wings. Did I not tell you already how I came by my name?”

  Pinaria shook her head.

  “It was given to me by my master when I was an infant. He owned my mother as well.”

  “What about your father?”

  Pennatus shrugged. “I never knew him. For all I know, the old master sired me.”

  Pinaria blushed. Pennatus clucked his tongue. “Really, do they teach you Vestals nothing about the facts of procreation? Well, of course they don’t. To what practical purpose could a Vestal virgin put such knowledge?”

  She blushed more deeply. “Really, Pennatus! I shall pray to Vesta that you may become more respectful of her servants.”

  “Why bother? I’m only a slave. I should think your goddess has no more interest in me than I have in her.”

  Pinaria sighed, exasperated. “You were telling me how you acquired your name.”

  “From this pendant I wear. As you see, it has wings. My mother wore it. It protected her in childbirth, but afterward, she wanted me to have it. She placed it on a cord around my neck not long after I was born. The old master’s eyesight was poor, and all he could tell about the talisman was that it had wings, and so he called me Pennatus: ‘winged.’ I was still quite small when my mother died. Her gift helps me to remember her.”

  Pinaria gazed at the black object, which nestled in the cleft of Pennatus’s chest. His tunic was crudely made, and the wide opening for his head exposed a considerable portion of his chest, so that the talisman was always visible. Not for the first time, Pinaria noticed that the muscularity of his chest was quite pronounced, and the firm, sunburned flesh was covered with soft golden hair. “What is the amulet made of?”

  He smiled oddly, as if at some private joke. “What does it look like?”

  She shrugged. “Lead?”

  He hummed and nodded. “And what master would bother to take a worthless lead pendant from a slave? Now, if it were made of some precious metal—silver, or even gold—many a master would take the talisman for himself, either to wear it or to sell it. Even a kindly, indulgent, slightly doddering old master might do so.”