A Song For Nero

by Tom Holt

  Only one way to find out. I couldn't tell you how we managed to get down the cliff path without breaking our necks; it was a miracle, that's all I can say about it. We didn't run and we tried very hard not to push and shove, because we knew without anybody saying anything that we were a hair's breadth away from smashing each other's heads in with rocks at the very slightest provocation.

  Also, we weren't looking where we were going; we were all peering and craning our necks as we went down, trying to see the gold, if it was still there.

  It was. Bloody hell, it was there, a damn great pile of it, like King Midas' shitheap. It was pretty well scattered, of course, and all those lovely cups and graceful vases and ewers and whatever you call them were bent and squashed and bowed all out of shape, where they'd bounced off rocks or had heavy stuff fall on them from a great height. Fat lot we cared, since it was all going in the melt anyhow The main thing was, it was a cliff's worth nearer the ship than it had been, and as far as we were concerned, that'd do us.

  Now maybe you've already asked yourself, if there's so much of this stuff, is it all going to fit on one ship? We hadn't; thought hadn't crossed our minds, or if it had, we'd shooed it away, like you chase crows off a sown field. Now, though, we couldn't hide from it any more. On the one hand, there was a hell of a lot of the stuff. On the other hand, the ship wasn't some poxy little cutter or a slim, pared-to-the-bone warship. It was a big, fat, broad-beamed grain freighter, with an enormous arse and round, chubby sides. We looked at the heap of gold, and we looked at the ship; and one moment we thought, we'll never manage it, and the next we thought, get out of here, it'll go in there with room left over, no problem. Then we figured the only way to find out was to give it a try.

  Closest they could get the ship in was about a hundred and twenty yards; the rest we'd have to do the hard way No more shortcuts, it was a simple matter of bending our backs and trudging, down the beach, dump a load, up the beach, over and over again. Talk about your rotten jobs. I don't think any of us was thinking about riches and luxury and troubles being over by that point; there was just the job, which had to be got done, one load at a time, one step at a time. We'd stripped off our tunics to use as sacks; the sun was hot, and I could feel it cooking my back and neck, like I was a slice of prime veal in Alexander and Pony-tail's best frying pan. By this stage, we'd forgotten what tired meant.

  You can get to that point, where every bit of you is screaming so loud you can't hear any one part, and so you keep going, numb from your neck to your toes, simply because you know that if you stop now, you'll never ever be able to start again. But we got there.

  Well, sort of. We filled the ship. There was still gold left over, but not very much, hardly enough to buy a medium-sized island ( Sicily for example) and the ship was riding painfully low in the water. 'That'll do,' the captain said, and we dropped what we were carrying, stepped over it and stumbled like the walking dead towards the ship.

  'Piece of cake,' the captain said. 'Right, let's get out of here. Anybody got any place they particularly want to go?'

  Hadn't thought of that, of course. Where do you go, with a ship full of gold?

  Not back to Rome ; show up at Ostia , and as soon as the customs saw what we'd got in the hold, we'd be in the prison, trying to think of some tale for the city aedile. We'd be luckier than we deserved if we got off with our lives, and as for the gold — forget it. Nearest land was Sicily , but Lucius Domitius and I didn't want to go there, obviously I guess the captain realised that, and (bless him) reckoned we had some say in the matter. On the other hand, we couldn't go very far, not with that much dead weight on board. We could sail up or down the coast. West; we'd be headed for Hippo, or Rusicade or Igilgilis, and just the sound of them was enough to put us off. East; well, there was Carthage , but that'd mean rounding Fair Cape . Neapolis, or one of the Greek cities of Byzacium, we'd have to get round Fair Cape and Cape Mercury as well. Catch us doing that. Otherwise, our only other options meant crossing open sea — northeast to Sardinia, to Nora or Sulci. The food would just about hold up, if we ate like bridesmaids, but what the hell were we going to do in Sardinia with thirty tons of gold?

  'All right,' the captain said, after we'd discussed the various options to the edge of hysteria. 'How about this? There's an island north-east of here, Calatha. I landed there once years ago, when my dad and me used to work crew on a freighter. We got blown off course out of Lilybaeum, a freak squall turned us over, Dad and me hung on to a barrel and a fishing boat out of Calatha picked us up the next day They took us home with them and we hung about there for a day or so till a ship called in for water, on its way from Spain to Sicily They gave us a lift, and they were in a hurry, so they didn't hug the coast round to Utica, they headed straight for Selinus across the open sea — and I'll say this for them, they weren't out more than a mile or so, which I think was a bloody good bit of navigation. Point is, a few hours from Calatha we passed by a little island, just a rock sticking out of the water with a few trees on top. I asked one of the men. He said nobody lived there, it didn't even have a name; no water, so nobody ever had any call to stop there. Now I reckon I could find that island again, and it seems to me that we could do worse than go there, dump the gold, backtrack to Calatha for water and food, back again to this island of mine, and do what we've got to do to turn all this shit into something useful.

  Strikes me we'll stand a better chance if we build a furnace and melt this lot down into ingots; that way, it'll be easier to haul and there won't be so many questions about where it came from. After that, off the top of my head I'd say Massilia. It's a regular Greek town, I never heard they were fussy about who they do business with there.'

  Now it seemed to me that all we'd achieve that way would be to move the gold from one secret cave to another; but I wasn't about to call attention to myself, so I didn't say anything. The bit about melting it all down struck me as sensible, anyhow Massilia I wasn't so sure about; never been there, but I'd heard a few things, like it was the sort of place where you can get your throat cut for spitting out the wrong side of your mouth. Then again, I've heard that about a whole lot of places, and ninety-nine times in a hundred it's turned out to be true. Fact was, wherever we went we were going to be in a great deal of trouble, human nature being what it is. The sort of people who'll buy a huge consignment of gold off you, no questions asked, are by definition the kind of people you wouldn't ever want to do business with, at least not unless you happen to have a couple of legions to back you up. We had a wolf by the ears, all right. In a way, it was a bit like being a king or an emperor. You know, without even having to look, that at any given time, everyone you come across is probably out to get you.

  Long story short; we set sail and headed for this island of the captain's. We all knew it was a crappy idea, but we also knew that none of us could think of anything better, probably because there weren't any better ideas out there for us to think of. We found it all right; it was just where the captain said it would be, though why that should've been a surprise I don't know Islands don't just get up and move away when they get to feeling lonely He'd said it was nothing but a lump of rock, and he was right about that. There was a little apron of sandy beach, a couple of caves, and the rest of it was a single tall, sheer mountain. Now I'm from Attica , where we know a bit about barren, rocky hillsides. After all, we spend our lives trying to grow stuff on the sides of them, which just goes to show that we aren't nearly as smart as we think we are, or we'd all have packed up and moved somewhere else when Theseus was still a little boy Phyle, where I grew up, is tucked away under the armpit of a great big mountain ridge that keeps on going up and up until you're almost over the border into Boeotia. So we take mountains in our stride, down our way; folks from other cities say we're born with one leg shorter than the other, for spending our whole lives standing on a gradient. Be that as it may You wouldn't have got me up the side of that mountain, not for a half-share in Dido's treasure. No wonder nobody ever bothered with th
at island. It was completely useless. You could count every blade of grass growing on it, and not run out of fingers.

  Ideal place, in other words, for a stash. We explored a couple of the caves, and found one that could have been dug out for us specially The entrance was narrow, you had to duck down and scramble through. Once you were inside, you sort of half-crawled down a short, narrowish passageway and then you found yourself in a big, airy gallery. It reminded me a lot of the main receiving room at the Golden House, in fact, except that it was rather more comfortable: airy and pleasantly cool, but it didn't get cold at night. Anyhow, it was plenty big enough to hide Dido's treasure in, so that's what we did. We were well used to lugging it around by now; it was like we were taking it for walks, as if it was a dog or something. We did the human-chain thing to pass the stuff through the cramped gateway and down the passageway, and that worked out pretty well: two days and a night, this time stopping for a breather every five hours or so. We couldn't be any more leisurely than that; we were short of time because we were low on food and especially water, if you see what I mean, and we had to allow a little over to get us across to Calatha. By this stage, none of us needed telling what to do. We worked together as easily as the hands work with the arms. It was a good feeling, actually, being part of that outfit. It was as though we'd all been together for years and years, like we'd all grown up in the same village. It wasn't so much that we all liked each other or got on particularly well. Rather, you didn't have to think when you were with those guys, you just knew automatically what they were going to do or say It felt right, somehow, is what I'm trying to tell you.

  We finished unloading mid-afternoon on the second day; and, in spite of everything, we decided to spend the rest of the day and the night in the cave, and push on for Calatha first thing in the morning. Basically, this meant no dinner and no more than a cupful of water each, but that wasn't such a hardship in the nice, cool cave. We parked our backs up against the nice, smooth walls, snuffed out the pine-resin torches to save fuel, and were all fast asleep in next to no time.

  Now, I'm not one of your big dreamers. In fact, I don't dream very often, and when I do, it's usually one of a fairly limited and unimaginative selection of nightmares, like the repertoire of a little touring theatre in up-country Italy There's the running-away dreams, where I'm being chased by soldiers or wild animals. There's the drowning dreams, and the trapped-in-burning-buildings dreams, the buried-alive dreams, the condemned-cell dreams, the ones where I'm a gladiator in the Grand Circus, unarmed facing a legion of huge blond Germans, and the ones where I'm nailed up on the tallest cross you can possibly imagine, so high up that I can see the whole world, from Spain to India, stuff like that, and most of it rather gloomy and depressing. That night, though, for some reason I chose to have a completely new and original dream, and it wasn't even particularly nasty or scary, by my standards at least.

  I dreamed, would you credit it, that I was Lucius Domitius, back in the old days. That's right. I was Nero Caesar, emperor of the Romans, and I was standing on the balcony of the Golden House looking down on the crowded market square (there wasn't any such balcony, of course, but it's like that in dreams, as I'm sure you know) and in my hand I had Lucius Domitius' harp, the one we'd been at such pains to nick off the musicians back in Rome. Actually, for some reason I can't fathom, we still had the damned thing with us; Amyntas had fetched it along, God only knows why, and it was tucked away on board the ship inside a coil of rope at the back of the hold. Anyway, that harp was in my hand. I was playing it, in fact, pretty well too, and every now and again I'd stop, and the crowd down below me would go wild, cheering and clapping and shouting for more; so I'd play something else — weird thing was, I'm sure I was playing actual tunes, good ones, only I'm sure I was making them up as I went along and when I finished, all the people would start up cheering again. This seemed to go on for ever such a long time, and in the little bit of the back of my mind where I knew it was only a dream, I remember thinking how unfair it was that I should be getting this dream and not Lucius Domitius, except that if he'd been dreaming it instead of me, we'd never have managed to wake the bugger up. Then, in this dream of mine, Seneca was standing next to me, and this woman who was Agrippina, Lucius Domitius' mother, and next to her the Lady Poppaea, Lucius Domitius' second, or was it third, wife; anyhow, the only one he ever cared a damn for.

  Next to her was this doddery old git with a nervous twitch, and next to him was a little boy, who coughed all the time, they could only be Claudius Caesar and his son, Prince Britannicus. A respectful distance behind them, I could see a big mob of senators, all wearing their dress whites with the flashy purple stripe, which only the Roman nobility are allowed to wear. Behind them (only now we were all at ground level, in the street, staring up at me on the balcony) was a thick crush of Roman knights, all of them ostentatiously flashing their big gold finger-rings. Out beyond them, stretching away pretty much as far as the eye could see, there was a huge assembly of ordinary people, farmers and soldiers and townspeople and even some riff-raff like me; also, for some reason, I could see Licinius Pollio and Amyntas and Myrrhine and Alexander and Pony-tail, even though they were just tiny specks in the vast crowd; and Callistus, he was there as well holding a towel to the slashes in his neck.

  Then, while I stood there on the balcony, still being Lucius Domitius and playing the harp, it suddenly struck me who all these people were, and what they had in common. They were all the people Lucius Domitius had killed.

  Well, when I say killed, been the death of'd be closer to the mark. Even so, there were ever such a lot of them; but they didn't seem angry or bad-tempered.

  Quite the reverse, in fact; they all seemed to be listening to the music, enjoying it, too. You know what people are like when a song or a good tune on the harp gets their attention; they don't fidget or cough or scratch themselves, like they would if they were listening to a boring speech or a lecture. Some of them'll have their eyes closed, the rest will be staring into space, some of them with soft grins on their faces, some of them keeping time with little twitches of their hands and feet. All these people — these dead people, who got that way because of my friend Nero Caesar — were like that, and I was the one playing for them; me, mark you, and not him, which was a bit odd in itself, except that in dream-logic (which at the best of times is as screwy as an Egyptian accountant's second set of books) I was him, and me as well. In fact, he was nowhere to be seen, if you follow me (and if you do, see a doctor and have your piss tested).

  Well, I kept on playing for a very long time, like I was afraid of what'd happen to me when I stopped. You remember the story of Orpheus, who could calm down wild animals and sozzled women with his music? A bit like that, I guess, only Orpheus ended up in small pieces, so he can't have been all that good at it. But eventually I got to the end, and I held the last note five beats, took my hand off the strings and waited to see what'd happen.

  To my great surprise, not to mention relief, they all began clapping and cheering and shouting, 'Encore!' to the point where I got the impression that they might cut up rough after all if I didn't give them something else. So I grabbed a handful of strings and started to play, and then realised that I was playing the intro to a song, which meant I'd have to sing.

  Now Galen the Athenian doesn't sing, not if you pull out his toenails and stretch him on a rack, because pretty well any torture you can put him through is going to be a summer picnic compared with what you're likely to do to him to make him shut up. Galen the Athenian can't sing worth a tanner's snot, and the best that can be said for him is that he appreciates this, and never ever tries.

  But there I was, warbling away like some girl's caged bird left out in the sunlight, and I tell you what — it wasn't bad singing, at that. A trifle reedy maybe, on the high notes, but a pleasant, lightish tenor voice, with good phrasing and all the other tricks singers use to make up for what they lack in the natural talent department. By an odd coincidence, Lucius Domitius h
ad a pleasant, lightish tenor voice, a tad on the reedy side but excellent phrasing, so I guess it must've been him, singing through me.

  I was so surprised to hear myself making a noise that didn't sound like a camel trapped in the works of a waterwheel that I'd sung two or three stanzas before it occurred to me to listen to what I was singing and find out what the song was about. Stone me if it wasn't the tragic history of Orpheus Caesar, the tormented artiste who strove to quell the uncouth violence of mankind with his divine music, and ended up dying, alone and betrayed by all, in a dingy cellar full of rats. Soon as I realised what I was singing I tried to stop, but I couldn't.

  Nothing I could do seemed to have any effect, the ludicrous shit just kept on coming, verse after unspeakable verse of the horrible thing, and the audience, bless their deceased hearts, were lapping it up, hanging on my every word, transfixed with the essential beauty of it all, or some such crap. I felt awful;

  I mean, quite apart from everything else, Callistus was down there in the audience, I could see him plain as a boil on a pig's bum — but he was stood there with this dumb grin on his chops, nodding his head gently in time to the music; in fact, if I didn't know better, I'd have sworn he was humming along, like he already knew the words.

  Well, by this point I really wanted to wake up. Crazy part of it was, I really did know it was just a dream, but at the same time I knew it was actually happening, and that I was Lucius Domitius every bit as much as I was Galen — who featured in the song, by the way in a totally unfair and inaccurate light, and it was only knowing I was dreaming that stopped me jumping out of the crowd and yelling for a lawyer. On and on it went; the sensitive, misunderstood, enormously talented youth, hated and spurned by everybody around him because he dared to sing and play the harp; the rival poets and musicians, mad with jealousy urging on the corrupt senators to plot a coup; the gormless, shit-for-brains petty swindler Greek hanger-on—