“Well?”
“Now they assert your arming of Wido was a long-premeditated act of sedition,” Marcus replied, holding out the rolled document to his father. “When the time was right, you planned to unleash Wido and all the barbarian hordes on us.”
“What outlandish madness!” His father erupted from his lethargy and tore the letter from Marcus’ hand. For long moments he stared at it, hands trembling, not really seeing, then he looked away, in his face the look of one who gazes upon the body of a loved one who died under torture.
When he spoke, his voice was unsettling; it was so empty of anger. “Until this time I thought I dealt with, if not a worthy adversary, at least one that was sane. They might as well say a cabbage is a herring. Some insults cannot be answered, lest they debase the innocent.”
“But they must be answered! They will interpret silence as guilt.”
“I no longer care how they interpret silence.” His father stared for long at the leaden sky visible through the door, and Marcus saw bitterness ebb out of his face, to be replaced by implacable surrender; the old man seemed to shrug off all the garments of his life—every duty, every belief—until Marcus felt he sat next to a naked child.
When the old man finally spoke it was in a close and gentle voice Marcus had never heard from him before. “You know, Marcus, I might not like what you have done to this house…but you have courage and a great heart. You search out truth in places others haven’t the wit to search. And that was gallant, what you did for Isodorus. If a man dies for such things, then these times are not worth living in.”
Marcus was quietly seized with astonishment. He always believed his father counted him little more than a rebel and a nuisance. He felt a rare pleasure, an immense relief, then a shadowy sadness that would linger, for all those years he had felt estranged.
But the words had the quality of a final peacemaking before death.
His father placed a clumsily affectionate hand over his own. “Now, I beg you, my son,” he said, “leave me in peace until the tenth hour.”
Wariness sharpened to alarm. He started to question the meaning of this, but the old man’s eyes forbade it. Reluctantly Marcus left him and retired to the library, setting himself to the grim task of searching through his father’s military reports and correspondence, the initial steps of preparing a defense.
At the time of lamplighting, Diocles came in soundlessly and interrupted Marcus’ labor. The steward’s ancient face was still as a death mask; his morose hound’s eyes were red-rimmed. Marcus realized Diocles had shed tears. Trembling, he rose to his feet.
“What is this?” Marcus whispered.
“At the ninth hour, your father opened his veins.”
Marcus felt stable earth fall in beneath his feet. He dropped into formless darkness.
No. I refuse this. He would not desert me with such cruel suddenness.
He broke into a run, almost knocking Diocles off his feet. The hour now was the tenth. He bolted through the garden to his father’s chamber, as if quick action could make a difference, but truly he knew better: Death had already won. In his chest was a hollow agony; he knew no past, no future; there was only a heart releasing all its living essence into water, a great benign presence leaving him to do battle alone.
At the door of the chamber he stopped. He was met by thick humid air, a sickly silence. The walls glistened with the damp. An acrid incense did not completely cover the heavy smell of blood. Old Greek texts claimed that ghosts craved blood—was that this ritual’s original purpose? To lure the ancestors’ ghosts to a feast? A tub of iron had been put in there and filled with warm water. His father lay in it, his head resting on the rim; Marcus could just see his face, dreadfully still in the dim light; it seemed made not of flesh but wet clay, as if already he had completed the material cycle, from earth to earth. Marcus was glad of the gloom; he did not want to see the color of that water.
“Father?” He felt like a profane intruder, as if he blundered into the dim inner rooms of a temple and found priestesses of Libitina laying out a corpse. The old man’s eyes opened halfway, and he peered at him through glassy slits. Marcus was horrified by the sound of his breathing—the struggles, the catches, the stops, were so like the last staggering steps of the dying.
“Father…, how can you leave us?” His voice quivered with effort, as if he thought through the strength of his voice alone he might raise his father up. He edged closer.
“Forgive me.” His father’s words did not seem clothed in flesh. “I sent for you when it was too late, lest you try to stop me.”
“It is not too late! You are strong still. I’m summoning the surgeon to bind up your wounds.”
“Do not. I command you.”
Marcus moved to disobey, then stopped. It was futile; he could not force life on one who did not want it. Nor could he watch his father die. He felt every move, every thought, trapped him deeper in mire; he could scarcely breathe in the dank air. He thought of what the great Stoic teachers had lectured of death, but their words were mocking noise. Grief itself was too deep, elemental and wild. All the letters of consolation written by the philosophers were bloodless words on dry paper; they no more mastered grief than ships tossed about on the surface of the wildest ocean mastered the cold, formless abyss below. He returned to his father’s side and knelt down.
Outside it stormed; all the gutters of the house were small roaring rivers. The sound caused his every muscle to tauten with grim urgency. Storm wind somehow found its way into this enclosed place and the flame of the one lamp was whipped into a wild dance; first shadow engulfed the room, then light gained precarious sway. Shadow will win, he thought. The lamp cannot burn forever. Dark need only be patient; it is older, far older than light.
“For what would you preserve me, Marcus?” His father’s voice groped for him. “So I can be reviled in a mock trial? So I can be called a criminal by a criminal…, then pelted with mud and given to some filthy pig of an executioner? And delight the scum that always gather to watch such things with the sight of my foolish head separated from my body?”
Marcus pressed his father’s hand to his forehead. “This should not be! You have done no wrong.” The words hung in the silence for a while, pitifully inadequate to aid them.
“They want our death, Marcus. Our death. Innocent or not. Nor will Arria or her children thrive long. Treason’s a contagion—Nero will assume they’ve all caught it from us. The Fates are tired of us, my son. A wise man knows the best time to leave the banquet, and he leaves early on…. The longer into the night you stay, the more dignity you lose.”
In the pause, Marcus tensed, knowing what his father’s next words would be.
“Die with me, Marcus. You’ll be charged, soon as I’m dead. Nero cannot let my son live. It’s an uncommon ruler that doesn’t fear the vengeance of a son, and there’s nothing uncommon about Nero except his lust for cruelty. Come with me….” His father’s damp hand crab-walked along the rim of the tub and seized his own in a feeble grip, giving ghoulish comfort. The old man’s whisper became excited. “Posterity will say both father and son pushed away the cup of dishonor. The world in these times is a cess trench. Refuse it with me.”
Marcus reflected but an instant on that death, with ancestors’ ghosts lauding your courage, arms outstretched to take you in among the blessed shades. Then he vigorously pushed it off.
“I am sorry, Father—I can’t die for honor alone. It might be I’ve too little love of it because of insults to it I suffered as Endymion.” He felt his father’s furious disappointment. “But I am willing to die seeking out justice. And I cannot do that here in the dark, in a tub. I can only do it in an open trial in the Senate. I want those jackals to bring me to trial. I welcome it. I will not let your name be vilified without a word said in your defense.”
“Reason is no weapon…against the boundless foolishness of youth.”
“And Father, there is also Arria. She might be sentenced to deporta
tion and sent off in chains. And there are even darker matters to keep me here. Arria’s girl is six; her boy is eight…just the ages Nero likes to take them. I dared not put this in a letter, but when last I attended the morning audience at the Palace, Nero asked to see them.”
“You believe those tales?”
“Awaken to the age we live in!” It was commonly known that noble children, usually girls, had for years been borne off to the Palace over parents’ protests to be given “schooling” by dubious tutors selected by Nero, ostensibly in etiquette and the arts—but the reality was a horror speculated of in whispers. Often the children would be returned home after years, listless and half mad, or without sympathies or passion. If so instructed, it was said, they would murder a parent. Tales came of them being kept in darkened cells for years while the Emperor came to them wearing masks and skins of bears or panthers while he took his pleasure of them. Incest fascinated Nero particularly; his greatest amusement was to force brothers and sisters to couple while he watched.
“Let them all go,” the old man breathed. “You can do nothing. They are prizes of war. We lost to Chaos…and must pass under the yoke.”
“Lost? I’ve not yet drawn a weapon.”
“I command you, as is my right as your father. Die with me.”
“And I disobey. Have Diocles bring the documents. Disinherit me. I choose to live.”
“May you roast in Hades.”
The young man heard then a horrible, impossible snuffling sound; his father cried like a babe. Marcus dared speak no words to acknowledge those pitiful tears for fear of humiliating the old man, but he moved closer and put a hand on his father’s to say: Sob if you want, I think no less of you.
When his father collected himself again, he whispered, “I’ll wait for you then, on the near side of the Styx.”
Marcus felt momentary relief that this battle was won, then fresh grim thoughts crowded in: I am utterly alone, and all rests with me. I have fought in the courts for someone else’s life. But to fight for my family’s, and my own? It is, I suppose, like learning, as acrobats do, to walk the wire and not look down. I will not have much time to teach myself. “Already you have passed from the life of one who is sheltered to one who shelters.” Isodorus pronounced those words so calmly, as if this role could be assumed simply as donning a new cloak.
“Marcus…, have you that black amulet still?”
In these times he never thought of that dark foreign pouch of earth. “No. I removed it when I became a man.”
“Humor a dead man and restore it to your neck. Divine forces are needed in this, if ever in your life. I mean not to dishearten you—”
“But you think my chances of saving us roughly equal that of the novice beast-fighter armed with a stick. I know my chances are poor. I see at once I will have to forge my own weapon. But if all I can do is see that the beasts suffer dearly for their meal, it will be enough.”
“The pain…,” his father breathed. “Bring in the surgeon for another cut, behind the knees this time, I’ve borne this long enough.”
Marcus shut his eyes, forcing his mind to emptiness to drive out the horror and pity. “I beg you,” he said softly. “Take a quick poison!”
“I am stronger than any poison. I have taken the small doses for years.”
Then the old man’s head dropped heavily back, and Marcus knew the surgeon would not be needed. He studied avidly every feature of his father’s face in the near darkness, struggling to retain a precise memory of it.
But his father managed to speak again, his voice now a child’s dulcet pleading. Marcus looked down, scarcely able to bear it. “My books…. I wrote on sand. They will be burned…. All that labor…a lifetime of…labor…. In ten years those that remember my name will spit on it…. My great work on Germania lies incomplete…. It is like dying while a helpless babe still needs you….”
“Your works will live,” Marcus said firmly, dismayed at how completely their roles had turned about: He was the parent who comforted, and his father, the child to be helped to sleep.
“Among the gods, perhaps.”
“Among men. Father, I will complete those last four books myself, and tell no one. Your works on the customs of the tribes of the North will be the highest authority. They will grace every library from here to Alexandria. The world will think you finished them. It will be my gift to you.”
His father turned faintly toward him. “That is well…very well…,” he began eagerly, then lost his strength all at once.
Marcus doubted his words could have given the old man much comfort, believing as his father did that he himself was doomed as well. But in his weakness Julianus seemed to have forgotten this. “Not die, forever,” the old man whispered. “Yes, I will…think on that. Marcus, by all the gods you are dear to me…. Will you forgive—”
He stopped abruptly as if he softly struck some unseen barrier. A shuddery breath escaped from him.
Juno have mercy, it is too soon—let him finish his words!
The lamp flame did a frightful, twisting dance, as though making way for the passing of his father’s shade. Then it died—the oil that fed it had run dry—and Marcus sat in darkness. He did not move, though he knew Diocles and the surgeon waited outside; he was not yet prepared to endure the sounds of the household’s wailing.
“Forgive you what?” he spoke aloud to the corpse. “That you mocked my pursuit of learning and thought it excess? Think no more on it, it was your nature, as it is the nature of horses to run. Why is it always those who need no forgiveness who in the end beg it? It is the ones who drove you to this death that I forever refuse to forgive.
“A lifetime of faithfulness, and this is your reward. If I live, I won’t serve out of duty, as you did. Perhaps duty, that is where we went off course. If we serve it should be for—for what? For love, love for what might be….”
In one swift moment he had the brutal thought his father was soulless matter, and nothing now existed of him anywhere. The existence of the spirit was a hoax perpetrated by priests to encourage offerings at the temples.
But then he sensed pricked, listening ears, a deft, questing mind, attentive, benevolent as it closed about him in the dark.
To his father’s ghost he said, “I will give back to you what you gave me: the world. That is what you gave me, no less. I will see that it dignifies you and speaks your name with reverence. You want an august memory. I will go and get it for you. And not from duty—that is a mule’s harness—but from love.” He imagined he felt his father’s spirit flinch.
Why could he not have clung to life a little longer to hear that? Marcus thought. But then, he realized, I would not have said it; I needed the dark, safe distance of death.
The corpse was not cold before a detachment of Praetorian Guards was dispatched to the house; two forced their way in to verify that Marcus Julianus the Elder was dead. When the suicide was reported to Nero, he at once charged Marcus Julianus the Younger with treason, claiming he abetted the conspiracy, then tossed in a charge of “filial impiety” because Marcus Julianus had not followed his father into death.
At dawn the following day Marcus sent a message to the family of the maid Junilla, offering to release her from the betrothal. Junilla had been promised to him almost a decade ago when she was scarcely out of her mother’s arms; he knew even if he survived he would be a poor match for a maid of such ancient lineage—the pall of disgrace would never be completely dispelled from his family.
And within the hour Marcus received an odd note in reply, written in the Emperor’s childish hand and delivered by Nero’s newly made wife, the eunuch Sporus: The wedding to Junilla was to be celebrated as planned, and at once; his trial date was to be moved back to make sufficient time for the young bride’s preparations. Why, in the name of Nemesis? It made sense, Marcus supposed, to a madman. Wedding, trial, execution—what perverse amusement did Nero mean to derive from this mockery of the passages of life?
And I wonder th
is about a man said to have set fire to half the city just to watch it burn.
As his father’s embalmed body was carried through the city, groups of citizens shouted: “The traitor is dead!” and mocked the elder Julianus’ writings, attaching them to poles and dragging them through mud. Marcus, as he walked behind the mourners, bearing the family’s ancestral masks, looked on in silent wrath as mud struck the pallbearers, the corpse itself. His father had so wanted to be loved by them. Before the gods, I must speak his defense!
The imperial government treated Marcus Julianus the Elder as if he had been condemned in fact, in spite of his suicide: The family estates scattered over five provinces were seized; Marcus Julianus, his son, was left with the great-house and its library. Arria, his aunt, fared less well: She was even stripped of her house because one of Nero’s concubines fancied it; she and her terrified children were forced to take refuge with Marcus Julianus in the mansion on the Esquiline.
When mid-month came and the time of the wedding drew close, one day at dawn as Marcus Julianus was conducting the morning audience, a stranger appeared, disguised as one of the family clients—those poor free citizens attached to every great-house who gathered at their patron’s door at first light to give a formal salutation and a promise of small services in exchange for money gifts. The interloper, concealed in a hooded, oil-stained cloak, hung back until the last retainer had departed with his small pouch of silver coins.
“Quickly, state your name,” Julianus said with weary tolerance. The hooded stranger emerged through the entrance hall with long strides full of the bullying arrogance of youth, then paused dramatically before the light-well of the atrium, watching Julianus through the shaft of morning sun slanting down in the space between them.
“We are more testy than usual today, are we not?” With a grand gesture the man threw back the hood of the cloak.
“Domitian. My wretchedness was not complete. Now it is.”
He had not seen Domitian since the young man had come to his house for the last day of the Saturnalia celebrations. Lately, some among Julianus’ acquaintances had began to call Domitian the “peasant crown prince”—for if civil war erupted, he had a more than fair chance of becoming an emperor’s son. His father, Vespasian, whom Nero had sent out to the province of Judaea to quell the Jewish revolt, had more legions under his control than any other legionary commander—and so was in the best position to take the throne by force. In these times Domitian was courted by everyone, and he strained his newfound privileges to the limit, borrowing huge sums of money, seducing women above his station, giving rich banquets, making friends among the Praetorian Guard. That he might not one day be within a breath of the highest office on earth rarely seemed to occur to him—he would worry over that one if the time came. Because he was ashamed of his own provincial education and an important man had to affect a command of the arts, he copied Marcus Julianus closely in matters of learning—Domitian’s flawless instincts for such things told him the younger Julianus was the man to imitate—studying with the same teachers, attending the same lectures, even echoing Julianus’s opinions at dinner-party debates.
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