by Simon Turney
The new quiet distance that had settled upon us meant that when I tried to persuade him of the folly of his endeavours it only spurred him on to greater heights. It was appalling. I could almost feel the spectre of Cleander hovering over both of us, laughing. Damn the man, but even in death his shade still cast a pall.
And while the emperor thus far stopped short of actually taking part in the gladiator fights in the arena, he did begin to join the bestiarii and the venators there, hunting beasts before the crowd. Again, I would not go and watch, though I knew from all our time together that he was a master huntsman, and I did not really fear for him in those events. But in addition to widening the growing rift between us, his participation also increased the gulf between him and the senatorial class, who disapproved utterly of his activities.
It was as though he had no fear of death. It was as though he challenged death to take him. Perhaps I was wrong, and there was an element of that old familiar melancholia there, after all. That same little boy who tore out his hair and dreamed of how it would feel to die. Still, I could not get through to him, could not persuade him to change his course.
And perhaps the most agonising thing about it all was not knowing why this change was occurring. It had something to do with that visit to Bruttia on Capri, but he would not discuss what happened there. He continued with a glazed smile as though nothing was wrong. We walked together, ate together, made love, but it felt different now – a life by rote. Perhaps this was how his wife had felt all those long years of their arranged marriage. I did not like it. I was losing the Commodus I loved and gaining in his place that Commodus that had been born of Cleander’s influence, given to dangerous extravagance.
Summer came with its oppressive heat and dust, and the rich, already unhappy with the emperor’s actions, disappeared to their country estates, leaving only a populace of the poor and diseased. The undercurrent of misery in the plague-ridden streets was glossed over with the excitement of the games and of the golden Hercules who took a personal role in much of it. Indeed, he began to wear a Greek-style chlamys of white and gold in public, instead of the staid Roman toga, and had his lictors carry before him the lion skin and club of Hercules, further identifying himself with that great hero. The people drank it in. We walked side by side in public as though I were an empress, yet that invisible wall between us remained, seemingly built by Bruttia Crispina even as she died.
Still at night he came to me and we lived our lie for a little longer, though even as he lay next to me I fretted over how I could repair a wound when I could not identify the cause. I did everything the physicians said in an attempt to sire him an heir, hoping that a pregnancy would close that rift somehow, but nothing happened. The prosaic woman in me had decided that those oysters and silphium Quadratus had forced into me years ago had ripped from me the ability to bear a child. The Christian in me told me that I had become so wicked that God would not let me procreate.
So we drifted on.
We were lying wrapped in our sheets one sultry Roman summer night. Commodus, tired by a day’s exertions, lay on his back, snoring gently. I lay on my side, facing away from him, wide awake and yet again trying to reason through a way to close the open wound in our relationship.
The first sign that anything was wrong was, for me, a preternatural feeling. Suddenly, gooseflesh prickled my skin and the hair rose on the nape of my neck. Something was out of place. I rose and crossed to the window, which looked out from our lofty perch over the valley of the circus. I shivered as I reached the window, unwilling for a moment to twitch aside the drapes, reminded of that day as a young girl I had made these very same moves to see a vast wall of water crashing along the street towards me.
Not this time. Still cold and skin-prickled, I half expected to see water everywhere, but there was nothing. The streets beside the great circus were dry and poorly lit, beggars, whores and drunks the only occupants at this time, half of those busy dying on their feet.
But I was aware of something else. There was a distant murmur. The sound of a huge din muffled by distance and direction. Something was happening, but it was happening at the far side of the city centre, beyond the Palatine, perhaps in the forum. My pulse began to quicken. The forum was where trouble often began. It was the main public gathering space where grievances were so often aired. I wondered whether someone had finally taken against Commodus’ new sports or his lion skin and club, enough to gather supporters and demonstrate.
Surely not. The senators who disapproved were largely absent, and rousing a rabble in the forum would be too much like real work for their sort anyway. No, it had to be something else.
Leaving Commodus to sleep, I padded across to the door and opened it. The corridor was empty and I paced along it and through the building, taking several turns and passing through doorways. I did not want to leave the complex and encounter the Praetorians on guard when I was still in just a silken tunic that left little to the imagination, but I did want more of an inkling as to what was happening. Most of the imperial apartments are angled to face the circus valley rather than the more level, public areas of the Palatine, but the complex is huge, and lightly traipsing up a flight of stairs and crossing several rooms I rarely visited, I moved to one of the few viewpoints facing north.
The windows here were neither shuttered nor covered with drapes, allowing the night air to waft in and out with what paltry breeze there was. I shivered as I approached, despite the heat. At first there still appeared to be nothing wrong. I could not see the forum from here, nestled in its valley, and my view was largely of the palace rooftops, but I could see the distant twinkling lights of the Quirinal, Viminal and Esquiline hills beyond, and the deep, dark purple night sky, heavy, like a blanket.
The one thing that was wrong with the view slowly insisted itself upon me. That blank sky. It was high summer and there had been little more than light, high, wispy clouds for many days now, and rarely even them. Where, then, were the stars?
It was now that I realised the sky was moving. That dark blanket was not the sky itself, but a vast cloud of smoke pouring across it. Even as my eyes widened, the huge pall of black billowed and blotted out those tiny myriad lights on Rome’s northern hills.
I squinted. The source must be somewhere in the forum dip. This was too big to be a deliberate fire set by a man, though. This was clearly a conflagration of some magnitude. I hurried back through the rooms of the palace now, desperate. On my journey through those night-time rooms trying to find a high window, I had seen not another soul, not even a slave. Now, though, as I returned, the place was coming to life. Servants and slaves hurried about in a panicked manner, calling to one another. Pairs of Praetorians scurried this way and that.
I reached my room to find the door open and the interior lit with lamps. Two Praetorians stood outside and as I entered I found Commodus pulling on a clean tunic and hurrying to find his boots. Slaves rushed in carrying my clothes and a toga for him, as well as his now customary Greek attire.
‘This is no time for such things,’ Commodus snapped at the slaves, belting his purple tunic and slipping his feet into his calfskin boots. He noticed me as he looked up. It is perhaps a sign of how things had changed that he never even bothered to question why I had not been in the room with him when he awoke. ‘You’ve heard?’
‘I have seen, from a high window. The forum, I think.’
Commodus shook his head. ‘The guards tell me it seems to have started in the Subura, but had spread to the Temple of Peace before the vigiles could even get their fire carts from the sheds. Rome is ablaze, Marcia.’
And then he was off. I hurriedly threw on my saffron stola and lilac palla, pinning them in place as I scurried along behind the emperor and his men. A slave running at my heel carried my sandals, but I let him continue to do so as I did not have time to pause and slip them on.
‘Have all the vigiles been called out across the city?�
� Commodus asked as Eclectus appeared from nowhere and fell in alongside us, a pile of wax tablets in his grip.
‘They have, Majesty. And I have dispatched riders to Ostia, Veii and Bovillae to seek extra manpower.’
Commodus nodded. ‘How bad is it? Bad enough to call on other towns, clearly.’
‘This is a disaster in the making, Majesty. Already the flames have reached the horrea piperataria, the storehouses of the eastern spice merchants. The only saving grace at the moment is that what breeze there is blows to the south and the fire comes this way, towards more spacious open areas. If the breeze changes and the flames spread through the Subura, we could be looking at a citywide blaze.’
I shivered at the thought. Such a disaster would be as bad as that flood in my youth. Worse, even.
‘Deploy the Praetorians and the urban cohorts,’ Commodus said, waving at the chamberlain. ‘Set them to keeping order where necessary, but also to the creation of firebreaks. We can do little with the forum and Palatine, and must just hope and prepare, but we can tear down the poor housing in the Subura and hopefully prevent the blaze extending that way.’ He paused as Eclectus struggled to open a map, and the two peered at it. ‘Send word for the men of the fleet at the Navalia to join with the vigiles and set up extra water sources here, here and here.’
His finger stabbed at the map and just for a moment I saw in Commodus a flash of his uncle that first night, the eve of the flood, when Verus and his co-emperor had taken in hand the protection and safety of the city themselves. Commodus was glorious again, then, his love for the city overwhelming anything else.
Even me.
For as we dashed from that place, officers and administrators flocking to Commodus’ side, not once did he look at me. Once he would have sought advice from me. Not that night. Not any more. Somehow Bruttia had ended that.
We hurried from the palace and emerged into a city in chaos. As Commodus paused to issue a stream of orders to the men around him, who then ran off in all directions, I took the opportunity at last to slip on my sandals. Then we were off again, heading for the northern slope of the Palatine. The huge, roiling black clouds now filled the entire sky like some dreadful portent, blotting out moon and stars alike. The heat from the conflagration was intense enough that it could be felt even here, more than two hundred and fifty paces from the flames, and the noise of the panicked population was audible even over the deep, throaty roar of the fire.
The scale of the nightmare was staggering.
From our high vantage point, the path of the inferno was clearly visible. A small portion of the Subura was already little more than the charred bones of buildings amid a glowing golden mass. The first act of the vigiles had been to pull down the adjacent houses to impede the spread, but now, following Commodus’ initial orders, Praetorians and men of the urban cohorts were moving into position too. The fire was already leaping the gap of the demolished buildings, embers carried on the breeze catching at the next tinder-dry house, clawing at it until it burst into flame. The soldiers were using long poles with hooks and ropes with grapples to haul at walls and tear them down, filling the streets with rubble and creating wide spaces to stop the fire.
The Subura could be saved, but if the long history of fires in Rome has taught anything, it is that a conflagration in the city will run amok as it pleases and defy all attempts of men to halt it. In the event, those firebreaks did work, and the northern side of the city was saved by the loss of a few housing blocks.
The other directions were a different matter entirely.
From the starting point of the blaze, the fire had leapt to the Temple of Peace, that grand marble space at the forum’s edge built by the Flavian emperors to celebrate the suppression of Judean revolts and the end of the civil war. The temple was now all but gone. The glorious white marble was black and charred, the roof caved in, the interior gutted and all the glorious paint burned off. I realised with a start that this temple was also used as a vault by some of the richest men in Rome – a sort of personal treasury in the same manner as the Temple of Saturn served for state finances. The blaze here would have made paupers of some very important men.
Leaving the temple little more than a marble carcass, the blaze had leapt into the warehouses at the eastern end of the forum, including those spice stores that had been mentioned before. Oddly, when you took a deep breath, which we tried not to do too often, being downwind of the fire, as well as smoke and soot there was an odd heady scent of super-heated incense. It was quite strange.
The vigiles were at work trying to prevent the blaze extending to the great temple of Venus and Rome, and they truly had their work cut out. Every time they managed to force back a tendril of fire that threatened the temple, another place would suddenly explode in a great orange fireball, engulfing screaming firefighters and scoring the walls of neighbouring structures. I could see Commodus deliberating whether it would be acceptable to pull down part of that most significant temple in order to save the rest, but to do so would be the worst kind of impiety and would be seen by Rome as some kind of sign. I was reminded unpleasantly of that rumour that had spread in our youth that Verus’ sacking of the Temple of Apollo had been the cause of the great plague that had been with us ever since. While I did not like to lend credence to superstitious pagan talk, even I worried about what next great ill might befall us if we pulled down the temple to Rome itself.
At the far end of the disaster the blaze was more easily contained, as the wind did not currently threaten the forum proper, though men were in position to stop it as best they could should the breeze change.
The real danger lay at the centre of our view, directly ahead. The blaze was crossing the Via Sacra in the form of sparks and burning debris and already shops and warehouses on this side of that important road were bursting into golden flame. I watched, heart in throat, as more vigiles arrived, panting and sweating, having driven their vehicle from some distant quarter of the city. Even as I watched, they began to pump the wooden handles on the cart, forcing water from the mobile reservoir into a pipe that they could aim at the critical spots. Others were creating human chains, passing buckets in a constant line from any of the numerous water sources.
It was having little effect. Some three thousand men were already at work in a relatively small area, armed with everything they needed to fight a fire, and yet they were losing this war. For every building they managed to douse and extinguish, another two caught and exploded into fireballs.
The blaze was coming our way.
The Praetorian prefect appeared from somewhere and gestured to Commodus.
‘You must leave, Majesty.’
‘What?’ The emperor turned to his officer.
‘The peril is too great. I have men ready to convey you to safety in the Praetorian fortress. From there a convoy can take you from the city to one of the imperial estates while this is dealt with.’
‘I am going nowhere, Prefect.’
The Praetorian looked troubled, but pulled himself up straight. ‘Respectfully, Majesty, I must insist on conveying you to safety. The emperor cannot risk his life in such a manner. The fire is moving towards the palace rapidly and clearly nothing will stop it.’
Commodus fixed him with a look. ‘A hundred years ago Rome burned almost to the ground. The emperor – that universally despised degenerate, Nero – acted like a hero for days, seeing to the safety of the people, organising relief, commanding his men in an attempt to halt the blaze. Are you seriously suggesting that I quit the city like a coward and let my people burn when even Nero stayed to help?’
The prefect lurched back from the vehemence of the emperor’s angry tone, but he acceded readily. The emperor would stay.
I stood there, rooted to that spot, coughing in the hot, smoky air, for the next two hours as Commodus continued to oversee the war against the blaze. A constant flow of men, both military and civilian, atte
nded him, and a small army of scribes and runners hurtled this way and that with questions and commands.
I watched.
The fire had caught swiftly in two more temples in the forum, and men struggled to prevent it spreading any further that way, where the heart of the ancient city lay, including its most powerful and critical temples and basilicas.
Worse still, the flames that had leapt the Via Sacra and set ablaze rows of shops and stores at the bottom of the Palatine slope had now spread to one of the most important buildings in the city. The eternal flame that burned in the heart of the Temple of Vesta was now utterly lost amid a much greater blaze that ripped and roared around that building. The adjacent grand House of the Vestals had gone up like dry tinder and the flames that danced on its roofs were now threatening the lower reaches of the palace of Tiberius and Caligula at the western end of the Palatine.
I watched in shock and dismay as the virgins of Vesta escaped their blazing sacred house, already missing one of their number, and threaded their way through clouds of billowing smoke, a thousand dancing motes of orange and desperate, filthy firefighters, and made their way up towards the Palatine. Ahead of them they bore the Palladium, the sacred wooden statue of Athena that had come to Rome after the fall of Troy and which was kept hidden under permanent guard, never seen by the eyes of the world. Not so, now. The misshapen ancient lumpy goddess was black, and I feared for a moment that one of the city’s most sacred relics had been burned, though apparently that was how it always looked. It was ancient, after all, and had been carried from a burning city all those centuries ago.
