Conspiracies of Rome a-1

by Richard Blake

  ‘Yes,’ I said, trying not to appear too sceptical about the outcome of this latest ceremony.

  ‘Then let us begin.’

  I dressed in the black suit of clothes Lucius had prepared for me. As I stood naked before him, he stepped forward to embrace me, but pulled back, muttering something about the need for purity of heart and body. He led me across to one of the smaller book racks against the wall. He pulled at it, and pulled again. With a gentle creak, it swung into the room on concealed hinges. There was a narrow doorway opening to a flight of steps that led down. Every few yards, a lamp shone dimly in its recess.

  Lucius made a gesture of antique devotion and stepped through the doorway. I followed into the darkness.

  We descended about fifty much-worn steps, our feet crunching as we walked on the unswept dust of many ages. The temperature fell and the air became damp and oppressive as we went. The lamps glimmered more and more dimly, and guttered as we passed.

  At the bottom of the steps, a narrow corridor stretched forward into the darkness. Lucius took up one of the lamps and walked confidently forward with me close behind. The flame of the lamp was reflected back from the dripping, concreted walls.

  At last, we came to the end. As before, Lucius knocked gently on the door, giving his name. The door opened. We stepped into a low but wide chamber of vaulted brick. At the far end was another doorway, locked and barred. In the middle stood a small brazier, burning low in the stale air. Before this, together with his assistants, stood the priest I’d first met in the Colosseum. He was dressed in black, arms folded and head bowed.

  ‘It is all as you have commanded, O Great Lord Basilius, most noble servant of the Ancient Gods,’ he said, looking up. His resonant voice filled the chamber. I shuddered.

  ‘As ancient custom requires,’ he went on in a voice still deeper, ‘I ask if you are truly prepared for this most certain yet dangerous consultation?’

  ‘I am prepared,’ said Lucius, his voice dry and nervous.

  ‘Then let it commence, according to the ways of our ancient fathers.’

  The priest waved his hand over the brazier. It suddenly flared up, filling the room with white, acrid smoke. At the same time, the room turned still colder. No breeze accompanied this. It was as if someone had uncovered a block of hidden ice.

  Lucius stepped back, a panicky look on his face. I resisted an urge to burst out laughing. I hadn’t been able to see what the priest had concealed in his hand. But I’d seen this trick any number of times in Kent. Maximin had been quite adept in scaring audiences into conversion. The cold I couldn’t explain. But every trickster has his own way of exciting wonder in the gullible. Where miracles are concerned, you need know only the part of how they’re produced to dismiss the whole effect as a fraud.

  I looked on with set features, now resisting the conditioned reflex to cross myself in a pretence of pious wonder. I tried not to think the worse of Lucius for his now clutching at my sleeve with an evidently rising terror.

  The priest leading, the assistants took up a chant in the most archaic Latin I’d ever heard. It was in short sentences, the stress on many words moved unnaturally to the first syllable. Frequently, I could only guess the meaning from compounds in the pure language. Some words I couldn’t understand at all. I wish I had been able shortly after to sit down with a clear head and record this chant. I doubt if it exists in written form, and I’ve now forgotten all of it, except for the reiterated claim: Cume tonas Leucesie prae tet tremonti, which I took to mean: ‘When thou dost thunder, O Lord of Light, men do tremble before thee.’

  But there was much more – all about the attributes and goodness and power and genealogy of the various Old Gods. At the end of each stanza, a silver bell would be rung, and the priest turned three times.

  At the end of all this, the priest did his trick again with the hidden combustible. I could feel my teeth begin to chatter in the still growing chill of the place. He motioned the rest of us to take our places within circles traced on the ground with white meal. Then he walked firmly over to the locked door. One of his assistants unlocked and unbarred it, before darting back within his own circle.

  The priest looked through the door. There was a small light within.

  ‘Is the victim purified?’ he asked.

  From within, the answer came: ‘It is.’

  ‘Is the victim willing?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Has the victim been bled sufficiently?’

  ‘It has.’

  The priest stood back and turned to us. ‘The communication is about to be opened,’ he said in a low, sinister voice.

  Two other assistants entered through the doorway. With them, they carried what I took at first for a statue – a statue, indeed, of Christ taken down from the cross. It had about it the same twisted, bloodied whiteness as something I’d recently seen in a church.

  But this statue was still breathing. Carried into our presence, naked and bound to a wooden post, was one of the slaves who’d failed to stop One-Eye the day before last.

  The assistants set the post down a few feet from the brazier, and got within their own circles. The naked flesh shone pale in the dim light. His head hung down on his chest. Blood dripped in a thin trickle from great gashes on the inside of each forearm. The gasp of his breathing came high and shallow.

  ‘The victim stands between life and death,’ the priest cried triumphantly. ‘He sees us, and he sees the Gods. Through him, we speak to the Gods, and they speak to us. It is all as ancient custom requires.

  ‘Ask what you will, O Lord Basilius, most noble and most pious.’ He turned back to the brazier and muttered some nonsense that I didn’t fully catch.

  I stood rooted to the spot. I hadn’t known what to expect as the culmination of this ceremony. But the last thing I’d expected was a human sacrifice. My own people used to go in for this sort of thing. But they had the excuse of being savages who didn’t know better.

  I once read that Julian the Apostate – the emperor, that is, who tried to restore the Old Religion fifty years after Constantine had established Christianity – sacrificed humans before setting out on his disastrous invasion of Persia. His palace in Constantinople, apparently, was found after his death stuffed with decaying bodies.

  I don’t believe this. Julian has a bad reputation, and the Christians have made up endless stories about him to drown out the rumours that they had him struck down from behind in his last battle. I know all Julian’s writings, and I don’t believe these stories. He may have been a superstitious pedant. But he wasn’t a murderer.

  Equally, though, human sacrifice was one of those things about the Old Religion that its devotees have always been rather coy about. And you can remember this if ever anyone comes at you with a word of that crap about the world of light and reason that the Church is said to have brought to an end. The Church may be a fraud. But it’s never done this.

  For a moment, I was torn. Lucius was my only friend in the world. He was doing this for me. But would Maximin have wanted this? Even had there been the slightest chance that this wretched human being was headed anywhere but into the blackness of death, could I have accepted the slightest scrap of information he might relay?

  Non tali auxilio nec defensoribus isti, I thought to myself – ‘Not by such means, nor with these defences.’

  ‘Stop this at once!’ I cried, stepping forward. ‘I’ll have no part in bloody murder.’

  I took hold of the slave’s arms and raised them to shut off the remaining flow of blood. He looked up to me, a weak, frightened look on his face. I saw his glassy eyes focus. He licked drily at his withered lips. ‘I haven’t been confessed, sir,’ he whispered. ‘Will God send me to Hell? I was a very bad slave – most inattentive to my duty. Will God punish me, sir?’

  ‘No,’ I said in a firm and priestly voice – the sort of voice that could banish all doubt by its very tone. ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son, I absolve you of all your sins,’ I continued,
improvising. ‘You stand on the verge of eternal bliss. Say with me this final prayer – say with me: Our Father, which art in Heaven.. .’

  The slave croaked along with me, looking intently all the while into my eyes. As we finished those words, which for the first time sounded so marvellously sweet, I felt him begin his last rattling breath. He died with the ‘Amen’ upon his lips.

  I dropped his arms and turned back to the shocked, silent gathering. The assistants were all on their bellies, knocking their heads against the floor in some scared, rhythmical prostration. Still on his feet, Lucius looked back at me with a white, terrified face.

  ‘The Gods of the Underworld are loose among us,’ the priest said with shaking voice. ‘They will punish us according to Their Offended Will. This trespass into our holy rites of the Galilean Blasphemy they will never forget, and may never forgive.’

  ‘There are no Gods – in the Underworld, or anywhere else,’ I shouted at him. ‘You’re just a fucking murderer.’ I glanced about the room. ‘I’m looking for one decent reason not to drag the whole damned pack of you off before the dispensator. He’ll see you punished, right enough.’

  Of course, the man wouldn’t look too kindly on me either. And I was in no position to drag half a dozen scared, reasonably strong men so much as an inch in any direction. That was reason enough.

  I contented myself with kicking over the brazier. The charcoals flared up briefly and then dimmed again.

  ‘The barbarian has profaned-’ I cut off the priest’s whine with a massive kick to his balls. He went down spluttering and gagging at the pain.

  I walked out of the room, back along the corridor towards the light that came down from the library. As I walked back, every one of the recessed lamps went out exactly as I reached it. I was walking into light with darkness behind me. Draughts can be peculiar things.

  41

  Lucius was onto his second jug of wine. I walked up and down in front of him, still trying to hold back the full weight of my anger.

  ‘But Alaric, my love,’ he wailed, ‘desperate times call for desperate measures. We cannot go any further by the unaided light of reason.’

  ‘Then let us go no further at all,’ I snarled. ‘I’m leaving Rome tomorrow. I’ll take the first ship to Marseilles that I can find from Naples.’

  ‘But the Gods-’

  I put my face very close to his and said slowly: ‘Lucius, there are no Gods. There is nothing but matter and space and time. There is no divine providence. There is no Judgement. Death is one eternal sleep.

  ‘Certainly, your Gods don’t exist. If they did, do you really suppose they would have given in so easily, that you people have to scurry round like rats in the sewers to worship them according to “ancient custom”? If there is any God at all,’ I added flatly, ‘it is the God of the Church.’

  ‘That mass of corruption?’ said Lucius, suddenly more effective in his argumentation.

  ‘Yes, that mass of corruption. The Church may be rotten. But it is triumphant. Unless you look at the purely human causes, do you suppose anything so rotten could survive century after century – let alone flourish – without the continual, direct intervention of God?

  ‘Those stupid books of yours give you as much ability to speak with the Gods as they show you how to make gold – and I haven’t seen you do much of that in the time I’ve known you.’

  I waved a contemptuous hand at the decayed grandeur of the library. As if in answer, I heard a gentle scurrying of mice in the still open doorway. No one else had come up. Either the others had left through another exit, or they were still down there, desperately trying to appease the imaginary demons I’d unleashed on the world.

  I stood up. ‘I’m going back to my lodgings. I’ll send tomorrow for my bags. Let this be our parting. I’ll get myself back alone.’

  Lucius followed me to the main entrance. I stepped out into the fresh darkness of the night. Though full, the moon was clouded, but still gave sufficient light to get me through the streets. My sword would do the rest.

  I walked a few yards. Then Lucius was beside me. His normal composure quite gone, he spoke from the heart. He was sorry – deeply sorry – for the horror I felt and for the shame he’d brought on himself. Yes, perhaps he was overly committed to the Old Gods. Perhaps not everything in their worship was seemly or desired by them. He’d been assured by the priest this was the truest way to unravelling the mystery. His own doubts had been broken down by that assurance. Now, he could see, there had been no divine presence in that underground chamber.

  But he’d only had a slave killed – and his life was forfeit in any event. If I wanted, he’d have the other one set free from his chains and forgiven. He’d even free the man completely. Everything he’d done was for me. Didn’t I realise how utterly devoted he was in all respects to me? Did I feel no atom of reciprocal affection?

  As I describe his urgent pleading and protestations of love, they don’t sound much excuse for the disgusting ritual I’d been too slow in breaking up. Here was a man who – whatever the exact legalities might have been regarding slaves – had just had a man murdered. I didn’t for a moment believe it had all been on the priest’s advice.

  Behind that cool, ironic facade, Lucius was a man of brutish, ungoverned passions. Forget the sacrifice – I’d seen him tyrannising over his wretched slaves after One-Eye had got away. He was just like those wolfish ancestors of his who’d sat day after day, picnicking while men gored each other in the arena for their entertainment. For however short a time, he’d brought me to a better appreciation of the Church and its mission of genuine civilisation.

  But you never met Lucius, or felt the bewitching effect of his charm. He was a superstitious bigot. He made that dreadful uncle of his in the Lateran another Epicurus by comparison. And I never could accept or understand his instinctive belief in the subhumanity of anyone who’d been unlucky enough to stand once on the auction block.

  But he was Lucius, the smooth and wonderful Lucius, whose charm was like the rising sun. Phocas aside, who could ever resist him? He was all I had in the world. And I did love him after a fashion. Everything he’d done, I told myself, was done indeed for me. And – my pen hesitates in its course, but I will continue – he’d acted in good faith.

  I stopped at a street corner, under the shade of one of those porticoes, now broken, that had once kept the sun and rain off the head in all the main streets. I embraced him.

  ‘Oh, Alaric,’ he wept, ‘I thought for a moment I’d lost you. I promise you, I’ll never do this again. I’ll sacrifice again to the True Gods – but never again anything like this. And promise me that we shall never argue again.’

  We stood hugging at each other and sobbing our reconciliation. Any street thieves who’d strolled by would have had an easy double target. But we were alone in the cool night air, the moon and a few stars overhead.

  Marcella had been firm about no visitors after dark. But this wasn’t a visitor, it was Lucius.

  ‘Gretel! Gretel,’ she cried, as we followed her billowing nightgown up to my rooms, ‘wine for the young gentlemen – wine and refreshments against the cold air of the streets.

  ‘And put your back into it,’ she snarled, lifting her cane. ‘When I’m visited by other persons of quality, we don’t have them served like what is with the common trash.’

  ‘That will be all,’ I said to Gretel as she seemed inclined to linger in the main room. My tastes didn’t yet run to threesomes, and I was beginning to suspect Lucius had no interest whatever in women. I changed back into my own clothes and took Lucius down the corridor to Maximin’s old suite.

  Lucius stretched his legs in the chair he’d taken and drank a little to clear his throat. He was back to business as usual. ‘What he may have thought is a mystery into which we cannot enter,’ he began. ‘But we know all that Maximin did during his last day. He was called to the Lateran by the monk Ambrose. He was probably stopped by another message, sent by person or persons unknown.
The slave Martin was involved in this deception, but I doubt as a principal. His function was to carry information back and take instructions. Maximin was then sent another message – almost certainly by the same – that probably called him again to the Lateran just as night was falling.

  ‘We know his movements in some detail from this house down to where he was jumped and then taken off and murdered. We can also imagine why the body was placed beside the Column of Phocas – it was meant as some kind of offering to the emperor. We can be sure those letters that both the dispensator and the Column of Phocas want – assuming, of course, they are not one and the same – were not with Maximin at any time during his last day. He hadn’t burnt them: there would have been evidence of that. But we can also at least suppose that he had read them the night before.

  ‘The letters weren’t with him on that last day, because he’d have had to hide them somewhere in the house. And we know that the house was searched by the professionals sent out by the dispensator who came for all his papers. Therefore,’ Lucius sat up, a bright smile dawning on his face, ‘therefore, he must have got rid of the letters some time between reading them and the beginning of our knowledge of his movements the following day.

  ‘What a fool I am not to have seen this. It’s so obvious. The Gods, it seems…’

  In probable deference to me, he trailed off. I knew he wanted to claim that the Gods had spoken to him in their own way, after accepting his sacrifice.

  He continued: ‘Did Maximin go out the previous evening?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I was with you. So, by the way, was Martin for much of the evening.’

  But wait… I looked at the uncleaned boots over by the bed. It’s strange how you can look at things and not see them for what they are. Maximin must have gone out! Hadn’t I tripped over these boots, put out for cleaning, as I staggered in from the sacrifice? Maximin couldn’t have been wearing those boots when he was murdered. No – he’d been wearing his nice boots, and they’d been taken off with his body to the Lateran. Hadn’t it rained early the previous evening? Hadn’t it rained the evening when I had taken as read that he’d been in all night?