Empire's End

by Leila Rasheed

  We got ready for the night in silence. My mother unpacked our household gods and we said a quick prayer to them. It made me feel more at home, as if things were normal, and I decided I would do this every single night that I was away from home. Then I remembered that I would not be going home. If I married Publius, I would be staying in Rome. That thought sank like a heavy stone into my heart and lay there.

  I lay awake. The room was the perfect temperature and the sheets a finer cotton than any we had ever slept on before. But it was hard to get used to the cooler air, and I ran over and over what my mother had said, trying to understand it. No one could stand up to imperial power, that was clear, so was it really fair to blame my father’s friends for not defending him against the old emperor? Now Septimius Severus was emperor and we were in favour. There was really nothing to worry about – was there?

  “We must be careful,” my mother said aloud, into the darkness.

  I turned over to face her. I could see only the outline of her face. The moonlight that came through the small window made everything look black and white.

  “Why?”

  “The Emperor’s sons have a. . . bad reputation. They say Caracalla is like a wild beast. First he had his poor young wife, Plautilla, sent into exile. Then he had her father murdered. Plautianus was a powerful man, and he was the Emperor’s friend from childhood, just as your father was. But Caracalla still had him put to death.”

  Plautianus. I remembered the headless carved figure on the arch that I had pointed out. The head had been sheared off as if with an executioner’s axe. It seemed that if the Emperor wanted you dead, he did not just kill you – he killed all memory of you, too. No matter how powerful you might have been, he blasted you out of existence.

  “But the Emperor will protect us, won’t he?” I was wide awake now.

  “I hope so. . .” She sighed. “I should not trouble you with this. Forget I said it. Your father has all the hopes – that leaves me with all the fears.”

  It was the first time, I realised, that I could remember her saying anything to me that was not either a reproof or an instruction. It was the first time she had spoken to me as an adult and an equal, rather than a child. And even though what she had said was worrying, the heavy stone in my heart lightened a little. Perhaps being a married woman in Rome would not be so bad after all – not if my family stayed close to me.

  We woke early, and were soon on our way to Rome. I looked back at the villa, feeling sorry to have to leave it so soon. It was so comfortable that even though Aemilia and Lucius might be untrustworthy, it was impossible not to feel as if you could stay there forever. Everyone seemed happy. My father had once told me to look at the slaves to judge the worth of a place. “If the slaves seem happy,” he had said to me, “you can be sure that the household is a happy one.”

  And then I thought of Nurse again. She had seemed happy, but she had still run away.

  7.

  The Greatest City in the World

  We found Rome guarded by the dead. Tombs lined the roads that led into the city. Beggars ran alongside us or called from the tombs, where some of them seemed to live. I was shocked. There were poor people in Leptis Magna too, of course, but I had never seen so many diseased, so many starving, so many without limbs. We quickly ran out of small coins to give to them, and my father was in professional paradise.

  “Look at that dislocation!” he exclaimed, peering out of the carriage. “I would have to spend years before I saw one of that kind in Leptis, and here I have seen three in the course of an hour! And look – terminal stage elephantiasis! What a place this is for a physician! There is nowhere like Rome!”

  My mother and I exchanged a despairing glance, and she opened her travelling box to find some food to give to a dreadfully thin child who was reaching a pitiful little hand up to our carriage. My father was greedily following a clubfoot with his gaze. I sat, feeling miserable and not knowing where to look. It all seemed so sad, so dirty and poor. Where was the glorious Rome we had heard so much about?

  As the streets grew narrower and the houses taller, I began to feel terrified simply by the city’s sheer size. By now, we would have reached the centre of Leptis Magna. And there were crowds everywhere – the roads were choked with carts and people walking and riders and soldiers. So many people! It was as if they were all being sucked up, swallowed by a huge monstrous mouth.

  “How many people live here?” I found myself asking.

  “A million, perhaps more,” my father replied. “Magnificent, isn’t it?”

  It was magnificent – but it terrified me. It was too big. I felt as if I were drowning.

  Carriages were not allowed into the city until nightfall, so when we stopped at a mansio to rest, my father left the luggage in the carriage with a slave, and hired some bearers to carry us onwards in litters.

  “The Emperor is expecting us,” he said. I had never seen him so nervous.

  As we went deeper into the city, the noise grew and grew. Six-storey tower blocks – called insulae because, like islands, they reared up from the sea of people around them – blocked daylight from the streets. People leaned from their windows to chat with their neighbours, and more than once we had to scoot to avoid a chamber pot being emptied. Arguments and love songs, politicians thundering away, all mingled with the shouts of people selling everything from vegetables to perfume, fish sauce to fine scarves.

  “Caput mundi!” my father said, as proudly as if he had built Rome himself. “Head of the world, the greatest city there is.”

  Just as he said that, our bearers stopped. An old man’s even older donkey had died in the middle of the road, spilling its baskets of onions everywhere. Helpful Romans, annoyed Romans, pick-pocketing Romans and just plain curious Romans had gathered around. The road was completely blocked.

  “Now I see why they demanded an hourly rate,” my mother said dryly, peeking through the curtains of the litter. “It will take us a day to reach the palace.”

  In the end my father hired some more people to clear the way in front of us, and we went slowly onwards. I stared out of the litter, amazed at everything. Everywhere I looked there were more roads, more streets of hammering smiths or busy vegetable markets, more glittering temples heaving out smoke from sacrifices, more steaming bathhouses, more jingling dancers and priests winding their way through the crowds. And the words! So many babbling barbarian voices, so many shrill Roman dialect curses being shrieked, so many arguments and jokes and fights! Even the walls shouted, for wherever I looked there was more rude graffiti than I had ever seen before. All these things were in Leptis Magna too, but there was so much more of them all in Rome. If Leptis was a busy fish pond, Rome was the ocean.

  My father was beaming, but my mother sat up as straight and taut as if she were a prisoner. I was terrified, but excited too. Soon we had left the ordinary streets and entered the heart of Rome, where the most important buildings were. Now things were different. There were more soldiers around, and more people in togas, fewer in tunics. Marble glared back the sunlight from arches built to honour great men. The straight lines of the inscriptions made me think of sword cuts, slicing down, then slashing up. Columns towered above the bustling, toga-clad officials. Upon each one, like an eagle watching for prey, perched a statue. Gods and emperors seemed to follow us with their painted eyes, their gilded crowns flashing golden in the sun. And there, among them—

  “A girl on a horse!” I exclaimed. I pointed. There was a statue with a girl like me, wearing girls’ clothes, astride a horse.

  “That’s Cloelia,” my mother said shortly.

  “So girls do ride! Can’t I have a horse?”

  My mother tutted and my father laughed.

  “Cloelia was captured by Rome’s enemies in the ancient days of Lars Porsena. She escaped from her captors by stealing a horse and swimming a river, and she took the other captives with her. She was brave, but that was wartime. Horses are for men in Rome, and not just any men – kni
ghts and senators.”

  I was silent. I watched the statue until it was out of sight. The stone girl, voiceless, unnoticed, looked out over the heads of everyone bustling in Rome. Then, as if a river swept me away from her, she was gone.

  My father kept up a commentary, pointing out the temples to different gods, the forums built by Julius Caesar and the Senate House.

  “Why are there so many soldiers?” I exclaimed, as yet another cohort in jingling armour and scarlet cloaks strode past. “There were fewer in Leptis Magna and we had the Garamantes on our doorstep.”

  My father and mother exchanged a glance.

  “The Emperor is a military man,” my father said. “He likes the army.”

  This still seemed odd to me, but a moment later, I had forgotten about it. For we had reached the enormous entrance to the Palatine Hill, the palace where the emperors of Rome lived. Looking back, I saw the busy forum with dignified senators crossing it, deep in conversation with each other. But when I looked ahead, I saw only soldiers with stony faces and eyes that were about as kind as those of the statues; less, in fact, for the painted eyes of the gods often seemed to smile at me.

  Our litter bearers stopped. Soldiers milled around. One centurion flicked open the curtain of our litter with his truncheon and examined us without a smile. I heard questions, orders and instructions. The spears in the hands of the soldiers were like the thorns on a cactus, glinting. I’d once grasped a cactus fruit by mistake and I remembered the pain. I kept my eyes on the spears.

  But people were expecting us. The gates opened and we were carried in; then they shut with a crash behind us.

  “You were inside the palace? The real, emperor’s palace?” Your eyes are wide. “How big was it?”

  I think hard. What can you possibly compare it to? I realise for the first time, perhaps, how different your world is to mine. The biggest things you’ve ever seen are the sky and the sea. The biggest things built by man – well, you can’t imagine anything other than our farmhouse. You haven’t even seen Londinium.

  “Imagine the most magnificent house you’ve ever been in. It has porticoes, passages, courtyards and gardens. Then imagine that house is surrounded by another house, more courtyards, more pools and gardens, more offices and workrooms. Then surround it with yet another, pathways and passages all branching like a tree. And another. And another. That was how it felt to walk into the palace of the Emperor of Rome.”

  Now you are really listening. Power is like the sun: you can’t ignore it.

  You just have to try not to get burned up.

  The noise from the city died away as we followed our escort, who was not a soldier this time, but a Greek slave who managed to look down his nose at us despite being a slave. I followed at my mother’s heels, trying not to stare as we passed pillars of different coloured marbles, statues covered in silver and gold, murals and mosaics like glittering jewels. Banners and curtains wafted in the breeze, and there was the sound of dancing water from hidden gardens. I caught the occasional glimpse or scent of beautifully dressed people drifting about like nymphs.

  Door after door was opened for us and closed behind us. Then, at last, the slave stopped before a door that opened like a picture frame onto a sunny garden, where a woman and two young men sat in golden chairs. Beyond them was only blue sky.

  “The imperial family,” the slave murmured.

  The woman who rose to meet us was Julia Domna, wife of the Emperor. She looked like her pictures, but with one difference – her skin was much darker than it had been painted. Her dark brows almost met in the middle, and her face was severe, with a strongly carved nose and deep-set brown eyes. Her hair was done in a way I had never seen before; it looked almost like a helmet, but you could see it had taken hours of painstaking work to create those regular, regimented braids. It framed her face like a setting frames a jewel. She was not beautiful, but one look at her told me I would never dare disobey her.

  Beside her, in golden chairs, sat two men in their twenties. One was older, and very like the Emperor’s statues, if the statues had been in a scowling, bad mood. The other, younger one looked more like his mother. I guessed at once that the older one was Bassianus, who was always called Caracalla, and the younger one was Geta.

  I remembered the arch of Septimius Severus in Leptis Magna. On that stone, the brothers had been shown grasping hands with their father, tall and straight and in complete agreement. Concordia: peace. But the men in front of me were not calm, dignified marble heroes. Caracalla’s face was red and puffy and his eyes were sharp and watched every move we made. Geta was pale and fidgety, and he seemed to know when Caracalla’s knife-blade eyes were on him.

  Even from a distance, I noticed how Caracalla leaned forward as if about to pounce, and how Geta cringed away from him, while trying to pretend he was not afraid. The cats stood like that back at home, when the older kitten was bullying the younger one into a fight he would never win. No, there was no concordia here.

  “Doctor – I have heard much about your skill,” Julia Domna said, sweetly.

  My parents walked towards her, responding to the Empress’s welcoming smile and her outstretched hand. I hung back, feeling tongue-tied and shy.

  A shadow fell across me. I turned and looked up, into the face of the Emperor himself, Septimius Severus.

  8.

  Eagles

  I recognised Septimius Severus at once from his statues. He was in his sixties, the same age as my father, but he looked older. Pain had scarred his face, and he was leaning on two sticks. When he walked, he hobbled. Still, his arm muscles were strong beneath his purple toga, and he had the face of a fighter.

  I do not know what I said or did. Probably nothing, but my expression must have echoed my shock and terror.

  “Who do we have here? A nymph unwilling to step into Olympus,” said the Emperor. Although I knew he came from Leptis Magna, it was still startling to hear an accent like my own, coming out of the mouth of the Emperor himself. He ushered me forwards into the garden, and the sunlight blazed in my eyes.

  “Quintus Camillus, the great physician!” I heard the Emperor exclaim. “Have you finally come to save me from the chalkstones that are crippling my feet?”

  The Emperor quickly dropped the Latin and spoke about his health in Punic. He asked my father to take his pulse. What my father diagnosed seemed to please the Emperor. Slaves came to offer us food. One – a boy my age – had a dint under his eye the size and shape of five big knuckles. He stared at the ground as he offered us the golden tray then seemed to vanish with the others into the depths of the gardens. I followed him with my gaze – and spotted the soldiers who guarded the gates, expressionless in scarlet, gold and iron.

  Somehow I knew that we were being judged – on our loyalty, our weaknesses, our potential usefulness. I also knew that, like slaves, we could be disposed of if we did not meet the Emperor’s needs. Now I understood why my mother said as little as possible and smiled a great deal.

  Driven by fear, I edged away from the Emperor and his wife, towards the blue sky. I did not dare look away from the Emperor for fear of being thought disrespectful, until I sensed a drop below me. I looked down behind me, and I realised that the garden ended in a cliff. There was a low wall, and then I looked out over the city of Rome. Red-brick walls and shining marble statues gleamed beneath me. Gilded roofs flashed in the sun, and columns of smoke wavered up from the temples. Below me, steep paths wound down through shady gardens, and even further below, I saw a long, massive loop of bare earth, from which the sound of distant cheers drifted up like the roaring of the sea at the bottom of the steep cliff. It was the chariot-racing stadium, the Circus Maximus, and I had the best view in the city. As I watched, an eagle wheeled slowly, using the tides of the air to lift it. It was close enough that I could see its golden eyes, staring after prey.

  Caracalla strolled over to me, and looked over the edge. He spat. It vanished into the distance. He looked at me and smiled, or bared his
teeth. I noticed his knuckles were badly bruised.

  “No way down but to jump,” he said. “Or be thrown.”

  “Or fly, sir,” I said, and regretted it at once.

  “Indeed,” he said, and gave me a considering gaze. “But only if you are an eagle. Are you an eagle, little girl?”

  I glanced back at the wheeling eagle. Eagles were the bird of Jupiter – the bird of the Emperor. They played the air like a skilled general playing the enemy, waiting for the perfect moment to strike their prey, with back-breaking force.

  Just as I thought that, the eagle, seeming to read my mind, swooped and vanished into the shadows. I winced, even though I did not see the victim. No, I was certainly no eagle.

  “No, sir,” I murmured, and wanted to add, but didn’t: I will be lucky if I get out of here without being a roast chicken.

  I turned back to where my father, Julia Domna and the Emperor were conversing. My mother stood a little back, her eyes modestly cast down. I remembered what I had heard of Julia Domna: that she was from a family of immense wealth in distant Syria, priests of Heliogabalus, a god of the sun. She was as tall as the Emperor and I thought they looked at each other with respect.

  The Emperor was talking about Britain. I had heard of Britain. It was the last province, a cold island at the end of the Empire. It had some wealth, but it was full of warring, uncivilised tribes with ugly sounding names.

  “The Caledonians and the Maetae have overwhelmed the Antonine Wall,” the Emperor was saying. “Well, we can’t allow this – the borders of the Empire must be secured. The army in Britain want support, and my sons are ready for a campaign, to prove themselves as leaders of men.”

  He looked sharply at Caracalla as he said this. Caracalla smiled, but it did not reach his eyes.

  My father nodded politely.

  “But my health is not good, so of course, I thought of you as a personal physician. At least I know you will not poison me, eh, Quintus?” He laughed. My father laughed too, although I was not sure how funny anyone found it.