The Philosopher Prince

by Paul Waters

  ‘Forgive me!’ he cried, spreading his big fleshy hands in a gesture of supplication. ‘How rude you must think me, to have kept you.’

  He was dressed in a bright ankle-length tunic of crimson and dust-blue, with embroidered edges and a belt of woven gold. The sweet smell of apple-scent hung about him. ‘No, no, please don’t stand,’ he cried, seeing us move. He eased himself down onto the couch opposite. ‘I have been obliged,’ he went on with a sigh, ‘to attend unexpectedly to matters of state: the new prefect has just arrived, you see, far earlier than anyone expected.’

  He spoke in careful precise Latin, with a hint of the sing-song cadence of Greek. He smoothed down his clothes, and arranged his large body on the couch, saying, ‘But you have had the most arduous journey, I am sure; nothing must disturb your comfort further.’ He turned with a smile to a dark-skinned, exquisitely dressed boy who had entered with him, who had gone off to stand beside the hangings. ‘We will have our wine, I think, Agatho. And – if these gentlemen do not object – you may give word to the cook that we are ready for him at last.’

  Earlier, waiting for the servant to fetch us, we had determined that we should try to escape that night. The unbolted door must surely have been a foolish oversight; either that or, amidst the muddle of our arrival, we had been taken for someone else. Best to be gone, then, before some clerk discovered his error.

  Yet this man Eutherius seemed to be expecting us. And now, after wine had been poured and passed around by the pretty servant-boy, Eutherius turned intelligent dark eyes on me and said, ‘I gather, young man, that you have fallen foul of our friend the notary?’

  I swallowed. The wine – fine and cool and fragrant, the kind my uncle used to import from the Rhine for his richest clients – suddenly tasted bitter on my tongue. I had allowed myself to hope, fool that I was. I should have guessed the notary would not be content with a quick death. He would want to twist the knife: he had made slow murder his life’s business. Torture was his art.

  I set down my gilded cup. ‘Then you know,’ I said, in a slow, even voice. I was about to go on, and tell him he could set aside this absurd pretence; but before I could speak the doors flew open and a team of liveried men marched in, bearing platters of food high in their hands, which they presented to Eutherius, and then set down before us: mushrooms in honey; diced fragrant chicken; mullet cooked with almonds and red berries; glazed pork on sticks; and other delicacies in small covered pots.

  ‘Excellent! How wonderful!’ cried Eutherius, beaming at the silver plates. But Marcellus coughed and frowned. His face was beginning to show the strain. ‘Forgive me, sir. I do not understand. Are we prisoners here? You treat us as honoured guests.’

  ‘And so you are,’ said Eutherius, turning to him.

  Marcellus looked into his face, waiting. After the hardships of the journey I could tell his patience was at an end. I suppose our host saw it too. With a sigh he set down the little embossed dish he was holding and said, ‘I see I shall have to explain, if I am not to spoil this banquet of ours. But please eat… and while you eat I shall tell you.’

  The notary Paulus, he said, was not the only man to make use of spies. It was a sad reflection that even spies and their masters were watched – the notary included. ‘But there it is. Spies are spied upon; guards are guarded.’ And after the disaster he had caused in Britain – which, said Eutherius with a nod, Marcellus and I knew of at first hand – Constantius the emperor had decided Paulus had criminally exceeded his orders, and demanded his presence at court. ‘The emperor,’ he added, with a dry look, ‘wisely ensures that he bears no responsibility for the faults of his subordinates.’

  He paused, ate a honeyed mushroom, then went on, ‘Well, as it happens, I myself was at court in Milan when Paulus arrived. He came by sea, all pomp and retinue and swaggering attendants – not at all what the divine Constantius wanted to observe when he had just received word of yet another rebellion. Really, it was a most injudicious move on the notary’s part.’ He puckered his lips, and surveyed us with wide innocent eyes. ‘As for you, we knew you had been taken, but in all the confusion we did not know where. Then my’ – he paused – ‘my contacts, let us say, in Rheims, brought word. You may have noticed your appalling journey improved a little thereafter. Now do stop staring, and try to eat. You both look lean as stray dogs.’

  We did as he bade us, and as my emotion subsided, I realized how hungry I was.

  While we ate he went on, ‘Between you and me, I can tell you that I too have had occasion to disagree with our esteemed notary. He is—’ He raised a finger, and pulled a face as if he had swallowed vinegar. ‘Well, perhaps best not to speak too freely of a man with such a reputation. So let us merely say that he can be contentious.’

  Marcellus, eating mechanically, was watching him with eyes as attentive as a greyhound’s. The servant-boy Agatho stepped up and refilled my wine-cup. I drank it quickly down.

  ‘However you look at it,’ Eutherius continued, ‘the emperor has been badly advised. Now Britain is in turmoil and barbarians range over Gaul at will. So he has appointed his young cousin Julian as Caesar, and that is why I am here.’ He slipped a berry into his mouth, and inclining his head to Marcellus said, ‘So, to return to your question, you are most certainly not prisoners. You are free to leave, even now, in the midst of this feast. The unfortunate men who accompanied you have already been offered passage home. And you, if you wish, are at liberty to go with them… But perhaps, when you see for yourselves that all I tell you is true, you will consider staying for a while. Julian will be here this winter. I should like you to meet him.’

  TWO

  NEXT DAY WE LEFT our room and walked about. No one stopped us.

  We had been housed in the oldest part of the citadel, all thick ashlar walls and stone passages; but elsewhere there were newer additions in the Roman style: handsome panelled rooms with mosaic floors, frescoes and pilasters, built around a cloistered garden planted with neat plum trees and bordered with rows of box hedge.

  We retraced our steps, and going by a different way we came to a long cavernous chamber flanked by squat columns and hung with heavy faded tapestries. It was some sort of room of state, with a dais and high-backed chair at one end. Grey winter light filtered in from narrow window-slits; an iron-wrought cresset hissed and flickered against the wall.

  At the far end was a high ceremonial doorway with a postern in it. We walked through, emerging onto a balcony with a flight of steps which descended into the paved courtyard below. Around us on three sides the sheer walls of the citadel rose up; on the fourth there was a stone gateway, and beside it a guard dressed in imperial uniform.

  Marcellus frowned down from the balcony. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘let us see if we are truly free to go.’

  We went down the steps, crossed the great square courtyard, and strode up to the gate. The guard’s eyes moved. He nodded at Marcellus, and let us pass without a word.

  We strode on, scarcely daring to turn. But when I glanced behind, no one was following.

  I let out my breath. I had not realized, till then, that I was holding it in. After weeks of captivity, and sleepless nights on stinking straw, and days filled with the corrosive dread of sudden, violent death, it seemed we were free, just as our strange new host Eutherius had promised. I felt almost ashamed to have doubted him. But Marcellus said, ‘We had to know, Drusus. Words are one thing; deeds are another.’

  We wandered without hindrance. The island where the citadel stands is the oldest part of Paris, with the rest of the city spreading out to the south, across the river. Outside the citadel walls is an old town of narrow streets and shadowy iron-gated courtyards; and, beside the river, on the eastern side of the island, an old temple set upon a raised base. We came across it on that first day. As we drew near I looked up at the gable-end. Written in sculpted bronze was the dedication: IOVI OPTIMO MAXIMO.

  ‘Jupiter’s temple,’ said Marcellus, gazing at the verdigris lettering.


  We climbed the marble steps to the podium, and walked along the colonnade of acanthus-topped columns, pausing at the ledge and looking down at the fast-flowing water below.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Marcellus, returning to the question we had been discussing all morning: whether we should stay or go.

  I was watching a pair of moorhens as they darted on the water, dipping down, then bobbing up like glistening black corks and shaking themselves.

  ‘There is still Paulus the notary,’ I said.

  Each time, as we had talked, we had returned to this. He nodded. ‘Yes. I thought we were rid of him.’ His voice was bleak and angry.

  ‘I too. But now we know differently.’

  I recalled the day I had dispatched the terrifying, hard-faced notary as a prisoner from London to answer to the emperor for his crimes. He had torn the province of Britain apart with his treason inquisitions. He considered himself above the law, like all of the emperor Constantius’s black-clad secret agents. It was I, and Marcellus, and Marcellus’s grandfather Aquinus who had stood against him in the end, and helped the people of Britain to drive him out. But too many had died. The province would never be the same. That day, on the quayside in London, he had said in a voice that chilled my soul that I had better hope we never met again. And now he was free, and restored to power. So much, I thought bitterly, for imperial justice.

  I glanced up from the swirling water to Marcellus’s face, then gestured out southwards at the undulating green land in the distance, with its leafless fruit trees, and old enclosures, and black vine stocks on the slopes. ‘He may have fled from Trier, but he is out there somewhere, and the emperor has forgiven him his crimes, or does not care.’

  I saw Marcellus’s broad, strong hand clench and unclench, showing the tendons in his wrist. He raised his arm and pushed his fingers through his mane of hair, in the unconscious way he had when he was troubled. His hair was the tawny colour of old bronze. It always turned that way in winter.

  ‘I will not live like a caged animal.’

  I nodded; then said, ‘I know.’ It was one of the things that made me love him.

  ‘If we go back, Drusus, we will never rest easy; we will never know when he is coming for us – he and his agents and that creature Faustus, lurking like thieves in the shadows, waiting for our guard to drop. He hates us too much to forget. Every stranger’s visit, every creak in the night …’ He paused and frowned. Then he said, ‘I ask myself what Grandfather would have done.’

  I too had asked myself this question. Aquinus had stayed true to his honour, and to what befitted a gentleman. He was gone; but his lesson stood before us. He had never consented to slavery, either of his body or his mind.

  ‘Then,’ I said, ‘we must see this onwards to its end, wherever it takes us.’

  He nodded slowly, and gazed downriver.

  It had been a day of cloud. But now at last the sun had broken through, horizontal spreading bands of ‘There purple and brilliant orange, set against the rain-soaked land. is something I like about Eutherius,’ he said, after a pause. ‘He may dress like a springtime flower, and drench himself in scents, but he is no man’s fool. I trust him, don’t you? If he thinks so highly of this new Caesar called Julian, then perhaps we should wait, and see him for ourselves.’

  Grief wears many faces, as in the time that followed I began to understand.

  Some men weep, and tear their hair, and like a summer tempest it is gone. This is the grief we see in the theatres: all show and noise, that makes the people stare. But even the young, if they stop to reflect, will know there is another kind. It sits in the heart, and dwells there like a banked-up fire, smouldering unseen.

  Marcellus had loved his grandfather deeply. In the absence of his father, who had died when he was young, his grandfather Aquinus had made him what he was, fashioning by his example every fine and pious and noble part of him. And since the last short illness that brought his death, Marcellus’s mind had been forced to his duty – to Aquinus himself, to his brittle mother, to the farm, the hands, the household. They had all turned to him, placing on his shoulders the burden of their need. And he, because it was in his nature, had borne it, as Atlas bears the world.

  He was twenty-one, my age. We had fought together and loved together; and when I saw he did not stumble I looked no further. I did not see what it cost him. But now, at last, I began to sense a change, the first flickerings of the hidden fire.

  As always, when we were with others, he was faultlessly courteous. He had been bred to civility, and good manners came to him as naturally as drawing breath. But when we were alone I would catch him gazing silently at the lamp flame, or out to the empty horizon, absorbed in some private melancholy.

  He was too generous to burden me with it; yet I could feel his sadness. If, at such times, I broke in on his reverie, he would look up and smile, and say something light; and for a time seem to shake off the mood. But always later it would return.

  Near the Paris forum, on the south side of the river, we had found the town baths, and the palaestra behind, with its grassy spaces and colonnaded athletics courts. Here, in the time we waited for Julian to arrive, we took to exercising. I had never known Marcellus fail in anything; so when he began seeking out the wrestlers and pitting himself against far stronger men, brutes for whom the gymnasium was their life, I supposed he knew what he was at.

  They thrashed him, time after time. Yet always he would go back for more, sitting afterwards in grim silence while I tended to his grazes, never crying out, keeping his pain within by some act of angry will. Perhaps the violence purged him of something. Whatever it was, he did not speak of it, even to me.

  Yet at times the mask would slip and he would grow angry at some minor thing – a broken bootstrap, a lamp wick that would not light, or some mislaid piece of clothing. Sometimes, at night, I would hear him stirring and groaning in his sleep, until eventually he would start awake. I would speak his name in the darkness, and he would pad naked across the floor and crawl beneath my covers, and fall into a deep slumber without a word.

  And next morning he would wonder how he got there.

  Thus the days passed; and it seemed I could not reach him.

  In those first weeks, we saw Eutherius often. Dressed like some large exotic bird, in oranges and yellows and mauves, he told in his sing-song voice of his life in Constantinople among the corrupt, self-seeking officials of the Consistory; or he lamented the crudeness of northern Gaul, which he regarded as brutish and uncivilized. But always there was irony shining in his dark eyes, as if he had known much worse.

  As indeed, I soon discovered, he had.

  It was one evening during dinner that we found out. He had happened to mention that he had passed that day along the street behind the forum, where the brothels are, adding with a shake of his large expressive face, ‘An appalling sight. Even the courtesans lack art. They move with the gait of farm-girls, paint their faces as if they were whitewashing a barnyard wall, stare and spit and pick at their noses. I wonder that they persist in their trade at all; I can hardly imagine they make a living… Not, of course, that I should be one of their patrons.’

  Marcellus and I answered quickly that we were sure of it. We had already drawn our own conclusions about his tastes, and they did not include the backstreet whores behind the forum.

  ‘But do not be deceived, my dear Drusus,’ he continued, divining at least in part my thoughts. ‘You will find it is often the finest peacocks that chase the dullest hens, and the most fastidious men who secretly relish the mire. One notices – being deprived of such pleasures oneself.’

  I agreed, even though I did not quite follow what he meant. He was clearly a man of means, who could afford whatever pleasure he cared to purchase. I concealed my sidelong look, but he must have noticed, for he said then, ‘You did not know?’ And, seeing my confusion, ‘Well, after all, why should you? I had assumed… but one should not assume.’

  Then he sat back on the wi
de upholstered couch, gently smoothed his clothes, and told us his awful story.

  He had grown up in Armenia, in a wild hill-village on the fringe of the empire. It was a land that had been often fought over. One day, when he was eight years old, tribesmen had come raiding across the mountains. They burned his village, and killed everyone they found, forcing the women first. He would have died along with his father and mother; but he had been a pretty child, and the raider had stayed his sword.

  He quickly learned, however, that he had not been spared out of pity. At the next market-town his captor sold him to a Roman merchant. ‘At first I could not understand it, for I was not ill-treated nor set to slave-work, and indeed my surroundings were immeasurably more lavish than what I was used to. But then, half a month later, when I was stronger and had ceased to cry all day, my new master, who had been kind to me, came one morning and told me I must go with two friends of his who were waiting in the hallway.

  ‘And so I went. They took me out of town, to a farmstead set in an olive grove. I heard the screams as we drew near, but even then I did not struggle, for in my innocence I did not know they gelded boys.’

  Marcellus had been eating, picking at a dish of dried apricots and figs. Slowly he set the dish down, and stared at Eutherius with an appalled look. ‘By the gods,’ he whispered.

  ‘It was long ago. One forgets.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Marcellus. ‘How is it that you serve the emperor?’

  He told us. After that day he had never seen his master again. As soon as he recovered, he was sold to men who traded in such goods, and they took him on the long journey to Constantinople. There he was purchased by an agent of the imperial palace. He was given an education, and, proving able, was put to work as a clerk. He excelled, and was promoted.

  ‘I have often reflected that, but for those cattle-thieves, I should be hoeing scree and tending goats on some sun-parched hillside, as my parents did, and theirs before them. But now I read pleasurably in four languages; I have a delightful house of my own looking out on the Bosporus, I have wealth and friendship, and I dwell at the centre of power. It was a trade no man would choose to make. And yet, after all, perhaps it was a good one.’