by Simon Turney
More than once I found the pair of them playing some frightening game that would have horrified their parents: waddling along a wall-top, or taking turns jumping across an open grate. Once or twice I was present at the inception of such larks, and it always seemed to be Commodus that urged Fulvus on, daring him to ever more worrying heights.
Being around those boys made me happy in a way I had never experienced before coming to the palace. And, oddly, my being held back in line with their education, when added to their intelligence and precociousness, somewhat evened the ground between us, despite the age gap.
The world moved on, with news arriving from Verus’ campaigns in the east periodically. It seemed that he was thoroughly chastising the Parthians, and the tales of his deeds were exciting to us children, relayed like heroic stories of old. I remember hearing the name Panthea on more than one occasion, though the conversations always drifted to silence as we children appeared. I knew nothing of it at the time, but Verus had, apparently, taken a beautiful and exotic mistress in Antioch, while his brittle and unpleasant betrothed waited and fumed in Ephesus.
Life changed notably on one day that winter as Saturnalia approached. It was the first step on the stairs down to Hades. The empress Faustina was closeted away in her rooms with her new baby boy, Annius, who, at only a year and a half, was too young for tutors and too young to play with his brothers. Our lessons were done for the day and we left the library where we had been trapped into learning our vowels with a dusty, dry old man who seemed slightly less animated than the marble busts that watched over our lessons. The world was a crisp white. Not snow, sadly, for children of any age wish eternally for snow. No, this was that hard white that leaves a million glittering diamonds on the surface of the stones and makes every step a treacherous one. I had been granted some warm, fleece-lined shoes that had previously belonged to another child of the palace, and I was grateful for them as we passed the vast banquet hall and emerged into the chilly air of the Flavian Peristyle. The fountain in the great octagonal pool was not working, and hadn’t been for the past week. A pipe somewhere had been ruined by the cold, according to a slave I asked, and the flow had stopped until investigations and repairs had been carried out. Consequently, the pool was now little more than an eight-sided sheet of ice, contained by low walls.
Fulvus, Commodus and I spent a few entertaining moments on the ice, skittering this way and that, sliding and laughing guiltily, knowing that we would be for it when one of the adults found us. But, with just a little testing, we had decided that the ice was thick enough to cast aside all worries. Likely it was solid right down to the base, for it was only a foot deep. Still, this being a garden frequented by many, we decided to move on and find our entertainment elsewhere, especially as slaves and functionaries began to wander around the edge beneath the colonnades.
We spent some time playing hide and find among the small rooms and colonnades at the western edge of the palace, where the windows overlooked that great forbidding temple of Apollo. On my third turn as the finder, I located Fulvus easily enough – a blond head badly concealed among shaped miniature laurel bushes – but it took us so long then to find Commodus that I had become quite frantic by the time I heard his familiar giggle echoing up from an open doorway. Fighting my fear of the dark stairs beyond, remembering that awful night of the flood and the terror that my mother had drowned, I gingerly descended to find Commodus alone at the foot of the steps in some dank chamber.
‘Too slow, Em,’ he giggled, using the shortened name the boys had saddled me with. ‘I win. Your turn!’
I argued against it. After that nightmare stair into damp darkness, I really didn’t want to play on, but Commodus was insistent. Returning once more into the cold light with relief, I reluctantly agreed, and hurried off to find a hiding place. And it was there that I first discovered magic.
Fulvus and Commodus were scurrying through the various halls and rooms, calling my name and laughing, shouting to one another and drawing very disapproving looks from a dozen slaves whose station forbade them from chastising young princes. I had found what I thought to be an excellent hiding place. I didn’t even know what the room was for, it was little more than a cubbyhole beside a doorway. I hunched down in the darkness, making myself small and unobtrusive, and that is why the girl never noticed me. She was a kitchen slave, judging by the aroma she carried with her. She moved furtively, which immediately piqued my interest, and I watched with fascination as she checked to make sure she was not being observed. She then dropped to her knees in the doorway and rummaged in a woollen pouch at her belt before producing something oddly shaped, a small roll of something black, pinned through the middle with a nail. She began muttering in little more than a whisper and it irked me that I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying, but I did hear a name: Hekate. She then lifted a small iron grille in the floor and dropped the strange item down into the gloom.
I was rapt. Hekate was a name I was vaguely aware of, in that Mother had reeled it off among many others in a long list of demons we were to loathe and shun as followers of the true faith. The slave continued to kneel for a moment, murmuring, then replaced the grille.
‘What was that?’ I asked from the shadows. The slave girl leapt to her feet with a shriek, eyes wide, searching the shadows. Feeling a little guilty for the fright I’d given her, I emerged from the gloom. I was clearly no slave, but my clothes also marked me out as low-born, and her shoulders slumped as she relaxed a little.
‘You gave me a turn there, Mistress,’ she said.
‘What was it?’ I repeated. ‘And who’s Hekate? Is he a demon?’
She gave me a baffled look, as though I had asked her what yellow smells like. Finally, she looked this way and that conspiratorially, and hunched over again. ‘I cursed a man. A bad man. A man who will end me if I don’t deal with him first.’
‘You cursed him?’ I had no idea what it meant, but it was clearly something forbidden even to pagans, and I was positive that my mother would be horrified at the notion.
‘I asked that his skin slough off and he die an agonising death.’
‘And this Hekate can do that? He must be a demon.’
‘Hekate is a goddess, Mistress. The dark lady of Achaea. And I hope she can. I really do. Cretheus deserves nothing less than Tartarus.’
Just then I heard the boys approaching, laughing and calling my name. The scream had probably drawn them. The slave gave me a desperate, hopeful look. She could not just leave. I was a freedwoman and she a slave, and she could not go until dismissed. I took pity on her and waved her away, wishing I’d had time to quiz her more on the subject. I made a mental note of the name Hekate and planned to investigate further. If only I could read more than a few basic sentences, perhaps I could have used the library. I would have to be careful with my questions, for there was a very good chance that a word in the wrong ear would land me in trouble with Mother, or the slave in trouble with her masters.
Commodus and Fulvus found me easily, then, for I had little time to hide away again. We played twice more, then moved on. Outside the grand dining hall, flanking it on both sides, are beautiful nymphaea, elegant and architecturally magnificent shrines to the nymphs of the Palatine water supplies. They are oval basins perhaps twenty paces long and three feet deep, with a central core of brick and marble sporting delicate statues of the nymphs, a constant flow of water between them. This place was clearly fed by a different pipe from the fountain in the garden, for the water gushed clear and fast, splashing into the basin only to flow away beneath the ground, probably washing along that curse the slave had dropped in the doorway.
The nymphaeum is surrounded by a colonnade and, while the buildings around it rise two and three storeys, the narrow sacred space is open to the air and freezing cold. One end of the nymphaeum pool was iced over, the water from the fountain slopping down onto the ice, and the two boys immediately hurried over to i
t. I adopted the manner of a disapproving matron as they grabbed sticks from somewhere – I have never known from where boys acquire sticks to play with, but they seem to be able to do it at will, even indoors – and started to poke the ice with them, giggling.
I left them to it, my own attention once more on the slave girl, her strange, rolled-up curse and her Greek goddess of magic. I worked through everyone I knew well in the palace, discarding each name in turn as unwise to approach on the subject, and was beginning to become exasperated when my attention was pulled back to the present by a shout of alarm. I looked around and could see only Commodus. He was waving his stick, white-faced and wild-eyed and shouting incoherently.
I ran over and, as I did so, my heart caught in my throat as my eyes fell upon the shape of Fulvus thrashing in panic beneath the frozen surface of the pool. The foolish boy had fallen into the pool somehow and been pushed under the edge of the ice by the current. The water would be colder than I could imagine. Commodus was wailing, pointing at his brother, and I realised with a start that I was watching this dreadful tableau and doing nothing about it.
Taking a breath and fighting my dread of water, I vaulted over the lip of the basin where the water wasn’t yet frozen and tried to grab Fulvus. He was still awake under the water, eyes wide and face almost blue. Somehow, he had slid further under the ice and I couldn’t grasp him firmly enough to pull him out, my young fingers swiftly becoming almost unusably cold and his limbs hard to grasp. I began to hammer at the ice, hoping to break through, though achieving little more than splintering thin shards from it and cutting myself on the sharp edges, my hands running with blood. I was too weak, and I was freezing, and there was little chance of me freeing Fulvus in time.
As I smashed at the ice, suddenly another figure was there with me. He was a slave in a ragged grey tunic, a little older than the boys, a little younger than I, yet his strength was surprising as he cracked and smashed the ice, bringing his whole body weight to bear. In moments, he reached Fulvus and hauled him clear as I climbed out, shivering. The prince’s eyes were closed, and he had become still as the slave boy laid him carefully on the ground. His skin was blue-grey, and I felt a rising panic. Was he dead?
I held my hand above his mouth and nose and felt nothing.
‘Hit his chest,’ the slave boy said, urgently.
‘What?’
‘That’s what they do with drownings. I’ve seen it. They hit the chest. Like this.’
And the slave began to pound rhythmically on Fulvus’ chest. I stared in shock. Surely he was going to break the prince, not save him. The constant wailing of Commodus, who I knew instinctively had dared his brother to cross the ice and started this whole mess, blared out like a fanfare across the courtyard and was already bringing others, footsteps slapping across marble as they approached.
Fulvus awoke suddenly, a torrent of icy water bursting from his mouth as he rolled onto his side, and the slave, panting, stood back. The prince coughed and choked, shuddering and hugging himself as Commodus continued to wail, regardless of this change.
‘Blankets,’ I shouted. ‘He needs to be warm. Blankets!’ Despite the freezing air, and in a moment of what I can only call unexpected heroism, the slave pulled off his ragged tunic and wrapped it around the ice-cold prince, hugging him tight while he himself shuddered in the cold.
Adults were there a moment later, grabbing the prince and taking him away, with not a word for the slave who’d saved his life and who now stood naked, shivering and unnoticed. Commodus followed them, howling like a lost wolf cub, batting away all attempts to mollify him, the guilt at having almost killed his twin all-consuming.
And then, suddenly, I was almost alone.
Almost . . .
I turned to find the slave boy watching me curiously. He had disconcerting grey eyes, so pale that I could barely make out where they met the white, the pupils black pinholes. His face was swarthier even than mine, betraying an eastern origin, and he was narrow and reedy for all the strength he had displayed at the pool. But it was nothing physical about him that touched me, even those peculiar eyes. It was something indefinable about the way he stood, the way he looked at me. It made me uneasy, like watching a caged predator. He might be just a slave, but there was something about him, and I spotted it the first moment I set my eyes on him. Just as something had connected inside me at the sight of young Commodus, so a similar thing happened with the slave. He was handsome in an odd way, and he had proved his value by saving Fulvus even at the expense of his own well-being. Yet I couldn’t find it in me to thank him.
His name was Cleander, and I shuddered as he walked away.
Night came and with it tension in the palace. Something was wrong with Fulvus. He yet lived, and was breathing once more, but his colour remained inhuman, and he did nothing but shiver and stare. I saw him twice that evening. Everyone was so busy that no one gave any thought to shooing away a palace child who happened to be in the room. Besides, everyone was so used to seeing me with the princes that finding me with Commodus near Fulvus’ sickbed was no surprise. The emperor shuffled aside all his work and worries that night to sit with his son, and Faustina, her face drawn and anxious, joined him.
When I retired to bed, I needed no urging from Mother to say my prayers. I knelt willingly, eagerly even, and asked God with every fragment of my soul to make Fulvus well again.
My relationship with the Lord did not improve. The next day, Fulvus had not recovered. New physicians were sent for from across the city. The best to be had, whether they be Roman, Jewish, Greek or even Aegyptian. They all said the same thing. He had not only technically drowned but had also suffered due to an extreme change of temperature. That he had been warmed and yet still not reacted as expected was not a good sign. The physicians would attend on him, but they recommended that the emperor and empress implore the gods, make appropriate sacrifices and, if at all possible, visit an important sanctuary of Aesculapius to seek his aid.
There being little chance of reaching a major cult centre of the healing god, the emperor and his entire entourage visited the sanctuary on the Tiber island that day, giving lavish offerings and seeking counsel and aid. I remained in the palace, of course. I was nowhere near important enough to be involved in such a visit. In the absence of Commodus, who I presumed was with his mother and father on the island, I stayed out of Fulvus’ room, though I rarely strayed far from it. That afternoon I had been in the corridor outside and had moved to the end, where a wide window gave bright light, far enough away from the two Praetorian guards on the prince’s door not to draw their attention, and I dropped to my knees and began to pray. Perhaps the Lord had not heard me last night due to all the noise and commotion in the palace?
I was so surprised at what happened next that I failed entirely to react. There I was on my knees, imploring God to save Fulvus, and suddenly I was shoved sharply sideways. I fell to the floor in shock and sprawled, wondering what was happening. As my rolling eyes settled on a figure in the window’s silvery light, they narrowed. The shape of Cleander the slave stood there with a haughty expression, lip curled and strange grey eyes unreadable.
‘So this is your fault,’ he said in quiet tones. I could think of no real response to such a ludicrous accusation, and simply stared at him. He pointed at me. ‘You and your stupid Judean cult. I saved him, but you’re killing him. The prince would be up and eating now if you sacrificed to the gods like a proper Roman.’
I was dumbfounded. A proper Roman? My mother had been brought from Greece, yes, but I had been born in the city to a freedwoman. I was a plebeian, but I was as Roman as they came. Cleander, on the other hand, had been brought over from Phrygia where they worship stranger gods than ever rose in Rome. A proper Roman? I hissed back at him. ‘I ask God to save Fulvus.’
‘Your god has no power here. And what do you sacrifice to him anyway? Words? Where’s your incense? Where’s the wine? The
coin?’
I rose, anger beginning to get the best of me. It was the first time I can remember being truly furious. I was raised to be passive and understanding. To try and always resolve without conflict. But I tell you, had I a rock in my hand at that moment, I might well have stoved in his head.
‘I’m supposed to turn my other cheek to you, ignore your violence and forgive you. And because I want to be a good Christian, I’ll do that. I’ll forgive you. But only this once.’
He made to push me again, but perhaps something in my expression stopped him. Certainly, he stepped back. I was a freedwoman of the emperor Lucius Verus, and he was a slave. I had allowed him to get away with pushing me over in anger, but I had warned him not to do so again. For my part, I meant every word. I would punch him in the eye if he tried again. For his part, I suspect he thought I meant I would report his behaviour to the major-domo, which would have seen him beaten at the very least. Whatever the case, he walked away. As he reached the door, he paused and turned.
‘In the old days, they used to burn your sort.’
And then he was gone. I seethed, shaking, promising myself that one day I would settle that score. I received my second shock in a short space as Commodus emerged from the shadows near another door, confusion creasing his young, innocent face.
‘What’s a Criss-chen?’ he asked, stumbling a little over the unfamiliar word.
Hmm. I thought lessons would be cancelled today, what with Fulvus bedridden, but it seemed I was to teach instead. I thought long and hard on the question as he watched me with those intelligent, searching eyes.
‘We believe in only one God. He is the creator of all things and the world is made according to His plan.’ I shrugged, trotting out the words I’d heard so many times. ‘There’s more to it, but that’s the main thing.’
‘Which god?’
I frowned in turn now. Mother had never actually named him. He was just God. My silence seemed to decide the boy, and he smiled.
