Rogue Emperor

by Crawford Kilian

  “Would anyone recognize you personally?”

  “My cousin Flaccus — but I doubt he’d be on guard duty. He’s an officer.”

  “Then we’ll talk our way through.”

  “And how shall we do that?”

  Pierce shrugged and grinned. “I leave that to you.”

  Five minutes later they were at the gate, ringing their bells to clear a path through the crowd, and Aquilius was shouting for the officer in charge. A squat, bulging-eyed soldier stepped away from the five others who were blocking the gateway. He saluted Aquilius, who gave a perfunctory response.

  “We have urgent news,” Aquilius said quietly, forcing the pop-eyed soldier to lean closer. “Don’t tell anyone, but there’s been a full-scale massacre of our people up north. They walked into a trap. This German here brought word to me. We must get through to the Praetorian camp as quickly as possible.”

  “Who’s been mass — ”

  “Tst! Hold your tongue if you want to keep it. Show no alarm. If your men get wind of this, or worse yet the civilians, we’ll all be in the worst trouble of our lives.” He grinned at the man. “Now show me a cheerful smile, and send us through. Very calmly.”

  “Who are you?”

  “The emperor will be asking who you are, if you delay us a moment longer.” Aquilius’s smile faded just a little. Pierce stayed expressionless.

  “Oh, well, then, go on through.” The soldier forced a laugh.

  “Good. We’ll leave our bicycles here. See that they’re not damaged.”

  They swung from their bicycles, and Aquilius led the way into the city.

  “Very well done,” Pierce murmured as they sank into the crowds. The Via Flaminia was now the Via Lata, Broadway, though it was little wider than most Roman streets. “One of the advantages of a coup is that no one really knows what’s going on.”

  Aquilius looked pale. “I was sure he was going to stop us and demand answers.”

  “If he’d tried, he’d be dead.” Pierce walked with one hand in his shoulder bag, fingers curled around the butt of the Mallory. “But you’d probably better get out of that uniform and back into your regular tunic.”

  Aquilius nodded. Pierce looked around as they walked down the narrow, flagstoned sidewalk, trying to gain a sense of the mood of the city. The usual late-afternoon bustle filled the streets: slaves on shopping errands hurrying in and out of shops, tonsores cutting hair and shaving people, idlers playing knucklebones on any clear patch of pavement. Merchants shouted at passersby, inviting them to see fine fabrics, good pots, rare spices, sizzling sausages. In a copyist’s shop, fifteen slaves took dictation from a sixteenth as they wrote out some aristocrat’s hen-decasyllabic verses. Sunlight blazed on the many-colored painted stucco of the insula walls and on the graffiti that defaced them.

  The little fish symbol was freshly scratched or painted almost everywhere, sometimes accompanied by the name Christus or Chrestus. Incongruously, posters had been plastered on many walls, drawing crowds who listened while some literate person read their text aloud; Pierce remembered the dazibao, the big-character posters that had been put up all over Shanghai in 2004 to protest the forced migration of a million Shanghainese to Vala.

  “‘ … further proclaims that each soldier of the Praetorians shall receive a donative of eight thousand denarii,’” said the schoolteacher reading the poster. The crowd muttered, and someone said, “More taxes!”

  “Not so,” said the schoolteacher. He turned back to the poster, and went on reading in declamatory tones: ‘“The emperor, mindful of his people’s needs, makes this donative out of his personal wealth. A gift of two hundred sesterii shall go to each Roman citizen living within the city, also from the emperor’s personal wealth.’”

  “If he’s got that kind of money,” a gap-toothed merchant said, “we’ll see some fine games and shows.” His grin settled on Pierce, and he gestured as if handling a sword. “Plenty of cold steel and hot blood, eh?” Pierce grinned back and sidled deeper into the crowd, where he could read the poster for himself.

  The first part was a long and accurate account of the crimes and follies of Domitian, except that it claimed the Hesperians were venerarii daemonem, worshippers of demons who had goaded him into ever worse excesses and abuses. The Hesperians were a race of degenerate sorcerers, bent on corrupting and overthrowing Rome through trinkets and gewgaws, while using the Romans’ own children as their agents. Now, at this moment of peril for the empire, the True God had sent priests to redeem Rome and return it to the mas maiorum, the old ways that had made her great. The new emperor, Martellus, was now both imperator and pontifex maximus, the supreme priest; into his hands the True God had placed divine powers to heal and slay.

  In consequence of which, the Praetorians, seeing the manifestations of divinity in the person and acts of Martellus, had proclaimed him emperor and called on all Romans to acknowledge him as such.

  Pierce and Aquilius made their way out of the crowd and continued down the Via Lata. A merchant intercepted them outside his shop, waving something silver.

  “Piscii, piscii! Finely made, good sirs, of exquisite workmanship!”

  They were silver pendants in the shape of fish, each on a silver necklace. Pierce laughed.

  “Are you a silversmith or a fishmonger?”

  “This fish won’t smell, good sir, and it’ll cost you far less than a real one. Five denarii, no more.”

  “Be off with you,” Aquilius snapped, but Pierce touched his arm.

  “We’ll each take one.” He counted out the coins while Aquilius looked annoyed, and then gravely hung one of the fish around his neck.

  “You do the same,” he said as the merchant went off after new customers.

  “It’s hypocritical and impious. I’m no Christian, Mr. Pierce.”

  “You’re not a Praetorian either. We have an old saying: when in Rome — ”

  Aquilius snatched the necklace and tucked the fish inside his tunic.

  They had gone perhaps three kilometers into the city when Aquilius led Pierce off the Via Lata and into a narrow lane running more or less east. It was almost a tunnel, with balconies and overhanging roofs blocking off the sky.

  Washing hung from balcony railings, and drunks argued in storefront wine shops. Occasionally a woman looked down from her balcony at the handsome young Praetorian and his giant companion. But no one spoke to them; a kind of hush had fallen over the back streets of Rome.

  As they neared the Viminal Hill, Aquilius paused by a fountain.

  “This could be a mistake, Mr. Pierce. We’re well known in our own neighborhood. If someone sees me, and the house is being watched, we could be taken.”

  Pierce nodded. “Give me directions; I’ll take a look and be right back.”

  Aquilius had been right: The yellow-tiled house with its green-painted front was being sacked. The shops on either side of the front door were shuttered, and a line of soldiers and slaves straggled out the door bearing pieces of furniture, bags of smaller items, and even kitchen utensils. What looked like bullet holes pocked the plastered wall. Onlookers watched and joked, but none seemed willing to venture inside to join the looters. Pierce walked past on the far side of the narrow street and glanced casually through the door into the atrium. The place had been vandalized as well.

  A soldier saw him looking. “Another enemy of the emperor,” the soldier said cheerfully.

  “Are they dead?”

  “Just the house slaves. The old fellow wasn’t in town. Cheap bastard he must be — this big fine house, and hardly a stick of furniture worth two sestertii.”

  “What if the new emperor’s people want the house? Won’t they want the furniture, too?”

  “The new emperor is rich enough to furnish every house in Rome like old Nero’s palace.”

  Pierce chuckled with the soldier, waved, and walked on up the street. At the first intersection he turned left and hurried back to Aquilius.

  “They’re in the house. Th
e slaves are dead,”

  Aquilius went pale, and his eyes narrowed. His fingers gripped the pommel of his sword.

  “They will pay. Oh, they will pay.”

  “More than you know, Aquilius. Now — where can we go? It’ll be dark soon.”

  Aquilius seemed too angry to care to answer, but after a moment he turned north and led Pierce off the Viminal and into a low-lying neighborhood of decaying insulae. One apartment building had recently collapsed; a work crew was salvaging bricks and timbers, while local children scampered over the ruins looking for plunder. A whiff of putrefaction told Pierce that several bodies still lay under the fallen building.

  “My father has a small clientela, mostly freedmen and men from the valley. I have little to do with most of them, but I know a few. We’re going to find one of them.”

  The system, Pierce knew, had survived the empire’s fall and would probably survive anything short of Doomsday itself. Every rich and powerful man in Rome attracted hangers-on, clients; in return for small pensions and gifts they provided an entourage, an intelligence network, a political claque. Each morning they would attend their patron, unless he himself was off paying respects to a still greater patron; the emperor himself was the apex of a pyramid of influence, the patron of patrons, the godfather.

  Aquilius’s father, Pierce knew, had kept himself almost a recluse; yet even he had his connections. He would not have survived Domitian’s long reign without them.

  Between a wine shop and a popina, narrow stairs climbed up out of a passageway. Aquilius climbed slowly but confidently up the dark stairwell, while Pierce followed with his head low to avoid cracking it.

  They emerged on the second floor and turned right along a wooden walkway overlooking a central courtyard. The building was superficially little different from tenements Pierce had seen in Mexico and Brazil. But the courtyard of a Mexican insula was common ground, a meeting place and playground for all its tenants, while here the courtyard was the private preserve of the wealthy renters on the ground floor. A couple of bedraggled cypresses reached for the sky; poppies bloomed white and blue in the flower beds. Cheap statues of Apollo and Venus stood on either side of a small fountain. Running water was a luxury not available to the upstairs tenants, Pierce knew.

  Aquilius stopped before a door of rough-cut planks and knocked. A man’s nervous voice replied: “Quis?”

  “Marcus Verrus Tullio, it’s Gaius.”

  Good, thought Pierce — he hadn’t shouted out his full name. A place like this had no privacy and perhaps many spies.

  The door opened; inside stood a small, frail man in a threadbare tunic that had once been white. His wrinkled face showed the signs of a recent attempt at a shave. He smiled uncertainly at Pierce, then pulled Aquilius inside and embraced him. Pierce followed and shut the door.

  The apartment was a single room no more than three meters by five, with a ceiling too low to allow Pierce to stand upright. The only light came from a doorway opening onto a balcony overlooking the street. The floor was crudely tiled, the walls roughly plastered. The room was furnished with a tall Roman bed, a couple of low stools, and a small chest; out on the balcony a thin woman was cooking something in a small iron pot over a charcoal brazier.

  “Antonia, look who’s here!” Verrus drew Aquilius across the room, into the light. The woman looked up with real alarm on her pinched face. Her ankle-length tunica recta was patched and threadbare; somehow she reminded Pierce of his mother, when he had been a boy and she had been a single mother trying to keep him fed and presentable.

  “Hush! Young master, please keep back away from the balcony. We’re most honored by your presence, but it would be unwise for others to see you here.”

  “I understand, Antonia. We’re sorry for intruding on you like this.”

  “Have you eaten?” asked Verrus. “We’re just about to sit down to a small bite. My Antonia is a fine cook.”

  “We can’t impose. But here — ” Aquilius handed him some coins. “Go downstairs to the popina and buy plenty of stewed rabbit, enough for all of us, and a jar of wine. And some bread. Good food in good company is a feast.” The little man was stunned by the quantity of money in his hand. “Of course, of course. Antonia, quick! Off downstairs with you, as the young master said. I’ll look after the porridge.”

  Antonia’s alarm softened somewhat. Taking the money from her husband, she dropped it into a leather purse on her belt and slipped outside. Verrus bowed and waved the two men into the stools, while he squatted on the balcony and fanned the charcoal.

  “You return welcomed, but in an evil time,” he said quietly; his voice was barely audible over the squalling of babies in the next apartment. “Have you been to your honored father’s house?”

  “My friend Alaricus has. He told me they’ve killed the household slaves. Now they’re looting it.”

  “It is a frightful outrage. The best families in Rome are being slaughtered — it’s like Sulla. Worse, it’s like Nero. To proscribe a family as ancient and honored as the Aquilii — infamia, iniurial. And for nothing but showing friendship to the noble Hesperians. Young master, when I saw them break into your honored father’s house yesterday, I wept that I could not attack them old and weak as I am.”

  “You are in danger also, Verrus. You’re known as a client of ours.”

  “We are humble people, young master, of no consequence.” He smiled weakly. “An old schoolmaster, married to a freed man’s daughter. Indeed, if people see a young Praetorian officer visiting me, they may think us closely tied to this new emperor.”

  “Providing no one looks too closely at me,” said Aquilius with a sour grin. “Verrus, we must ask a favor of you.”

  “After all the favors your honored father has bestowed on us, I shall be happy to do whatever I can.”

  “We need only spend the night here, and then to leave in the morning.”

  “But this wretched room is unthinkable for you!”

  “More thinkable than a night in the streets, with real Praetorians roving about. We’ll be quiet.”

  Verrus fanned the charcoal and thought. “Did anyone see you come in?”

  “A couple of children across the courtyard. No one else, I think.”

  “Then we shall take the chance. In the morning, though, you had better leave well before dawn. This building is a rookery in the morning, prying eyes everywhere.”

  Antonia returned, shutting the door quickly behind her. She held a carved wooden bowl filled with a grayish stew; the aroma in Pierce’s nostrils was pungent and savory. Tucked under one arm was a jar of wine, and under the other a large, flat loaf.

  “Now we can celebrate the new emperor’s accession properly,” she said with an angry smile.

  The food was good, though Pierce almost choked on the metallic taste in his mouth. His head was hurting again; sitting in the gloomy apartment, he was at least out of the glare of sunlight, but the smells of the building and the street below were overwhelming. Reaching into his shoulder bag, he opened the Pentasyn vial and quietly swallowed two capsules.

  Verrus and his wife paid little attention to him, except to refill his bowl and wine cup. They asked Aquilius questions about Hesperia, but it was clear they had little real interest in it except as a source of marvelous devices. Aquilius, in turn, said little except that it was a land much like Rome but with many novelties. When he asked them about what had happened in Rome since Domitian’s death, however, they became excited.

  “The Praetorians have terrible new weapons,” Verrus whispered as he shoved stewed rabbit in his mouth. “They look like ax handles, perhaps, but they make a thunderous noise and spit fire. Something comes out of them — someone told me it’s like a slingshot, but no one ever hurled a stone like that.”

  “Where did you see them?” Aquilius asked.

  “In your honored father’s street. His slaves were killed with one. Just pulled out of the house, stood up against the wall in front of a soldier. He pointed it at them,
and when it made such a noise I thought the slaves were jumping from surprise just as I was. Then blood gushed from their bodies though no one touched them with so much as a feather, and they fell dead in the street. Hundreds of us saw it.”

  Aquilius and Pierce exchanged glances. Pierce rubbed his face wearily. So they had indeed been bullet holes in the plaster. Another gift to Rome from her descendants. And Robinetti had thought the Romans were psychotics.

  The next day or two would be very bad.

  Ten

  Sundown was Roman bedtime. Pierce and Aquilius refused Verrus’s offer of the bed and wrapped themselves in their cloaks on the wood-plank floor. It was hard, but Pierce had slept in worse places. Despite the rumble of iron-tired wagon wheels and the swearing of teamsters in the street below, he was soon asleep.

  A thunderous explosion woke him and the whole city. While Verrus and Antonia called on the gods, Pierce went to the balcony door. It had been left slightly ajar, to give the room a breath of air.

  The city outside was intensely dark, though the sky was strewn with stars. Pierce heard anxious voices calling from other balconies and windows; dogs yapped in the distance. In one or two windows across the street, lamps burned. Down in the street, a line of carts and wagons had stopped. Teamsters gaped upward.

  The sky flared with light and a moment later another explosion echoed across the city. Pierce looked up in time to see glowing red streamers reach out into the darkness. A wavering spark climbed toward the zenith and exploded in blue flames.

  “Fireworks,” he said in English to Aquilius.

  The young Roman stood beside him in the doorway, watching skyrockets splash and boom across the night sky. Before long, pale faces clustered on every balcony, looking up and gasping at each new bloom of burning light.

  Verrus and Antonia had crept from their bed and now stood behind Aquilius, who turned and smiled at them comfortingly.