Julianus rose and uttered a stream of formal apologies.
Would Nero ask to see the bodies for proof? He was ready for that if necessary. He wondered if Arria, when she came to consciousness and found her children well and alive, would ever forgive him for his desperate playacting. Had he warned her of the ruse in advance, her reaction would not have been so genuine; Nero might not have believed him so readily.
And the children were safe but for the moment. They could not be hidden from sight forever. The city must be delivered from Nero.
The guests escaped quietly and quickly when the entourage of Nero was gone.
When Julianus pulled aside the brocade curtain of the bridal chamber for the ceremony’s final rite, the house was filled with the oppressive quiet of muted fear. Somewhere beyond the curtains a single cithara player still plucked at his instrument, his music closer to the elements than to art as he struck the same three strings in a dully repetitive melody, as though he had fallen under a spell.
What meaning can there be in such a union? We are captives. And her interests lie not with me but with others.
Junilla started as he entered; he had a sense this was an unwanted intrusion. Quickly she turned to him. Her tunica, a vapor of white, was set in motion about her, settling softly like calming feathers. At her back was a rosewood table on which was a forest of cosmetics jars—rouge in terra cotta pots, jars of antimony with griffins’ head handles; he was certain she moved to cover them from his sight.
Then she watched him with those great silent eyes.
How like the old mountain rites of Bacchus this is, he thought, to take a stranger in passionate embrace.
The bridal room had been carefully prepared ahead of time. Lamps filled with cinnamon and hyacinth oil were placed in the wall niches. A low table supported by wooden acanthus leaves held crystal ewers of water and hundred-year-old wine, a gilded bowl of figs and dates. An altar to Juno was set against one wall, her stern matronly face veiled and unveiled by the smoke of the incense that burned at her feet. A wedding scene was painted on the wall above the bridal bed, the whole bordered with an encaustic rendering of birds and flowers; it showed a reluctant bride—a ghostly figure seeming to float in her gauzy garments—being led to the groom, her downcast eyes terrified as she was coaxed by her mother, on one hand, and the god Hymen, patron of marriages, on the other.
Junilla seemed to have shed that imperious confidence he had seen at the banquet table; those beseeching eyes, that awkward stance made him think of a startled foal. So many unpleasant mysteries stirred in those eyes.
Softly he said her name, trying to reach across the gulf of darkness between them, to touch her with his voice.
“Junilla, what is wrong?”
She looked away and shook out her hair, seeming more half-tamed creature than woman—as likely to reply with a gesture or movement as with a word. She loosened the pearls that dotted that dark, rumpled mane; with quick, tapping sounds they struck the mosaic floor. She made no move to retrieve them; they might have been cast pebbles. It made him sharply aware of the difference in their attitude to wealth. For him, it was to be put to use to gain knowledge. To her, it was water from a crossroads fountain—there would always be more.
“Utterly nothing is wrong,” she said finally, her voice too eager and light. “I am a fortunate woman. I believe I already feel love for you.”
“If that were said with any less conviction I would send for a physician to make certain you had not died. Truly, we know nothing of each other.”
She laughed low in her throat, then approached him with a walk meant to be smooth and seductive. With a quick, clumsy movement of one shoulder she let the tunica slip, baring most of one creamy breast, casually as the maid who pulls forward a tress of hair to have it admired. It was arousing but also amusing, like watching the young daughter of a prostitute unwittingly imitating her mother.
He drew her close and gently lifted her chin. “You seem to know your way about a bridal chamber. One would almost think it’s the third time you’ve been married this year.”
“You are so very amusing,” she said silkily, a fevered emptiness in her eyes.
He tugged at the knot of Hercules, loosening it, letting the filmy tunic fall free to its full length. Now he was aware of the comfortable roundness of her body just visible through its white mist, of the shadow in the cleft between overfull breasts barely contained within her breastband. Desire, he thought, struggles up in the most inhospitable of circumstances. That mysterious body—would it be like her face? Pearly satin, pliant ivory, a rose-flushed garden of delicate mysteries?
She moved for him swiftly, seizing his mouth with hers, all the while wriggling free of the loosened tunica. Then all her boundless softness was pressed against him; languidly she arched her back, moving against him in a practiced way. As he guided her toward the marriage bed, she remembered to struggle half-heartedly—every girl was taught this was expected of a bride. He felt he wrestled with cushions. Then with the smooth confidence of a dancer she melted back onto the bed, pulling him atop her. Something is sadly wrong here, a warning sounded in the outer reaches of his consciousness, but he felt a pull toward her that bypassed the mind. There was nothing in life but her firm but giving flesh, glowing amber in the ruddy light of the lamp, the fine, silken skin of her inner thighs, her quick strong hands roving with a child’s eager impatience, and those luminous eyes, whose look—first restless, then calm—recalled bright, darting snakes, signaling danger without direction or purpose.
Finally he pushed her back to arm’s length and held her still, saying with more weary surprise than anger, “I have known seasoned concubines less accomplished than you. Did your mother hire you out to a brothel? Junilla, who has used you so?”
She glared at him, feigning great offense, that gaze a delicately thrown dart. Her rampant hair fanned out on the bed, giving her a look that was intimidatingly womanly. But she was too young to have the resolution to maintain the look; it dissolved quickly to anxious despair.
“You do not like me,” she whispered, looking away.
She looked so pitiable then that he took her up and held her close. “I know I dislike these masks you put on. Look at me, Junilla, and show yourself truly.”
She hesitated, approached him cautiously and gave him a child’s chaste kiss. Then with exaggerated passivity, she fell back and lay still. He had a sense she merely exchanged one mask for another, thinking he would like this one better.
He felt a catch of sadness. Behind these masks was a mangled spirit that would always seek the dark.
After a time he resumed caressing her, and the breastband came loose all at once, releasing those heavy breasts. She gave a small gasp and shot up, twisting away from him, struggling to draw the coverlet over her breasts.
Then he saw it—twin stains on the breastband.
Milk.
His first thought was that this was one more grotesque jest of the night. But swiftly he scented some tragedy here. “Junilla, who in the name of the gods—”
“Let me be! Leave me!”
She writhed violently, raw terror in her eyes as he tried to pull her close; her hair lashed his face. Finally he grasped her securely by the shoulders and held her down.
“Stop this at once! Now, you will tell me who has done this!”
She broke into deep, bitter crying, as if vomiting up all the evil humors of the mind, all the poisoned memories she held within her.
“Whose child did you bear?”
She gasped for breath, started to reply, then her courage failed her. She stared at the wall as though she saw something hideous there, invisible to him.
“Answer! I must know who has insulted us so. Junilla, I will not harm you. Tell me!” he said softly, releasing her and gently smoothing her hair from her forehead.
“It’s a wrong you’ll never redress,” she said finally. “He whose child I bore…can defile temples.”
“Oh, curses on Nemesi
s! Nero.”
“He made me expose it…last night…. I did not want to. ‘You cannot drag a babe along to your first wedding,’ he said, ‘the second perhaps, not the first.’ I did not want…”
“You were one of the victims…taken to the Palace.”
“Yes,” she said without emotion. “I have been his concubine since I was nine.” He felt a lurch of nausea. Was there anywhere those sucking tentacles did not reach?
“My mother took me there…so he could have me when he wished. Always he was masked. Sometimes before the Guards…” He sensed that on the surface she felt the horror of it, but beneath was a desert of indifference.
“Why do the gods allow such a monster to thrive, and when will the world be rid of him,” Marcus said softly.
“Now you despise me. I am defiled—a broodmare, a worn-out sack, ugly and used. What will you do with me?”
For a moment he thought he saw her unmasked. She gave him a look that begged help, and now it did seem those eyes let him in.
“It is no more just for me to despise you than to despise the beaten slave forced to thieve. And you are still my wife, no matter what that bloated viper did to you.”
He then pulled her close, held her a moment, and mumbled in her hair, “You are safe, for a time, I will see you safe….”
The comforting embrace warmed slowly to a sort of shy passion. What began as ritual lovemaking, necessary to seal a ceremony, flooded its bounds, and soon he was enveloped in plush, rose-scented flesh, drunk on the grassy smell of her hair. Then he was lost in that taking that is also surrender; despite her knowledge of love, he took great care, as if with a virgin bride.
The light in the chamber grew dim during their lovemaking; he was only half aware of her turning once and reaching swiftly, delicately into the array of cosmetic pots.
Soon after, her pleasure came and she cried out, catching him by surprise, whipping about like some fighting cat. She was seized with a Bacchic frenzy, with a madness that did not know him. Cat claws raked down his back, drawing blood.
His own rush of pleasure obscured the pain. But even through the red-gold haze some dim instinct alerted him; there was something not quite right in the way she scratched him; it was too deliberate.
Within moments, as he lay atop her, spent, an odd, dreamlike sense came to him. The flame of the one lamp still burning seemed to ripple and flow as if it were reflected in moving water. It seemed he knew the true nature of all things—and their nature was horror. Junilla was an undine, rippling beneath him, a monstrous spectral child, those lustrous eyes empty pits, her mouth full of fine, sharp teeth. The pattern of intertwined vines on the coverlet was alive; it was no pattern but crawling scorpions. Horror swarmed over him.
She had poisoned him.
He struggled from the bed and nearly fell. The mosaic floor heaved like a sea. Distantly he was aware of Junilla, upright on the bed, watching him expectantly. He found the lamp and held it close to the cosmetics jars to illumine them, all the while feeling he clung desperately to the regular world he knew.
“Madwoman! What have you done!” he breathed. One clay pot held a thick, vile liquid; droplets of it had been dribbled onto the table. He guessed it was adder’s venom.
Enough to kill? He seized her right hand. Flesh and venom were still beneath the nails. He flung it down. Roughly he pulled her to her feet. Even through his delirium he was certain there was no remorse in those bold eyes.
“Have you loyalty to no one and nothing,” he said, shouting now, grasping her shoulders and shaking her. “You lay in ambush for me, even after we made peace!”
“I am no madwoman,” she said calmly. “I am His Divinity’s most perfect creation. Look at me.” Her eyes ignited. “I was his for so many years…my flesh is his flesh. All my acts are laudable and fitting because I have a god in me.” Dawn light filtered into the bridal chamber. In his confused state she was an apparition of unholy light, a sweet demon-child with blood running from her lips.
He pushed her out of his way and sought the bellpull to summon Diocles and a physician. Then he sat heavily on the bed, his head in his hands.
“You have done this because Nero granted me an open trial.”
“You know nothing! You are no one!”
“You are the slave of Veiento. You judge he is the next safe port, after the ship you’re aboard sinks.”
“Traitor, traitor, traitor,” she cried out in a kind of ecstatic delight. “You will fail in all you do, and die. You are mud. You are no one. You would not even sacrifice a pig for me! I despise you.”
As he sank back, eyes glazed but still open, Junilla realized suddenly he was not dying quickly enough. The mixture she purchased from the Etruscan prisoner was reputedly swift. Nero would protect her from prosecution if Marcus Julianus died, but if he lived—she would live in fear of him for as long as they both walked the earth.
Terrified, she edged toward him, steeling herself to suffocate him with a pillow, but Diocles came then.
Diocles stared at them, openmouthed.
“Bring Thales and his store of antidotes at once,” Marcus Julianus managed hoarsely. “Conduct Junilla to her own apartments and keep her under strict guard—and say nothing of this to anyone.”
He sensed the poison might have stabilized, but he was not certain. He thought then, it must indeed have been a nest of maggots the augur shielded from view.
With the aid of the burly doorkeeper, Diocles dragged Junilla out, and when Julianus was alone there came to him, perversely, a taunting vision of what Junilla was not. It might have been his closeness to death, or it might have been that the poison worked like a mirror, reflecting Junilla reversed. But he saw then a different sort of woman—a shivering daimon rising out of the wreckage of that marriage bed, a maid untouched by the foulness of cities, innocent and fierce as wild things, bold and curious about the world; a woman with a questing, daring philosopher’s soul. The vision fused with the maid of his father’s records, that wild creature born from a few written lines. Who since the time of the Kings has seen such hallowed devotion….
With a wrenching bitterness he knew then how much he had wanted a companion of his own heart. Vigorously he shook the vision off. There was no time for such dreams while Nero lived, while he had not yet righted the injustice done his father.
CHAPTER XI
NERO’S TEMPER WAS SO CHANGEABLE THAT Julianus dared not send Junilla off; he judged it wisest to confine her to a guarded chamber so she could not make any further attempts on his life. In the light of morning she seemed more pathetic than evil, and he wished her no harm—he wanted only to be well rid of her. He believed part of Nero’s purpose had been to introduce a fanatically devoted spy into the household; Junilla was to listen and report his true opinions of the Emperor’s poetic works, of his competence to rule—for Nero literally believed that the condemned were divinely impelled to speak the truth.
But afterward Nero seemed to lose interest in the whole affair; he had much to distract him. The state of his Empire daily grew more precarious; everywhere his hold on the army loosened. As the legions of Hispania revolted and proclaimed their Commander, Galba, as Emperor, then began their slow march on the capital city to wrest it from Nero, he began the sharp descent into final madness. He would call emergency meetings of the Senate, then instead of giving his prepared address, would demonstrate a new water organ he had helped design. On other days he would begin preparations to go on campaign and fight for his throne. But he planned to bring his stage equipment so he could perform his tragedies for the soldiers, and he meant to march with a bodyguard composed of his concubines dressed as Amazons armed with axes; once he went so far as ordering them to be given men’s haircuts before he abandoned the plan, managing to convince himself once more that all was well.
The trial of Marcus Arrius Julianus the Younger was set for a day late in the month of Maius. It was but one in a dreary succession of treason trials in which the captive Senators were prodde
d to condemn one of their own for Nero’s pleasure; none who set out at dawn that day for the Senate House had good reason to believe this trial would end differently.
Ten Praetorians in gilded armor came to conduct Julianus to the Curia where the Senate was housed. The walk was short but the low places were flooded with rain; it seemed to Marcus the city pelted him with mud to humble him. He felt strangely alive, lucidly aware of ordinary things—the red tile roofs sturdily climbing the hillsides like a grand flight of steps to the sky, the feeble dawn touching the glistening cobbles underfoot, transforming them into dark, mysterious gems, a crossroads shrine with its pitiful offering of scattered flowers, the hopeful knots of citizens crowded around the bakeries from which drifted the comforting aroma of bread. Already he felt detached from this city that was so like a goddess-mother, nourishing, punishing, all-pervading—this savage, luxurious city that enslaved him, freed him and now set him an impossible task, like some labor of Hercules cruelly laid on a mortal man. Here it ends, Endymion. Whether I perform it well or fail miserably, either way I am bound for the sacrificial pit.
As his entourage came to the Sacred Way, the street was thick with crowds; by the time Marcus Julianus reached the Old Forum, their numbers had multiplied so that a cohort of Praetorians was needed to contain them. Shopkeepers, freedmen, aristocrats and beggars stood shoulder to shoulder; they were remarkably silent, he thought, for their numbers. Only gradually did he realize they came to show love for him and wish him well. He knew the tale of the wedding had been retold so often it had been transformed into legend with himself cast as hero; his denials had actually won stays of execution for several of the conspirators Domitian named that night; that his steadfastness actually slowed Nero’s murderous rampage was counted a near-miraculous thing. But he had not known the tale had moved all classes to such devotion, nor had he realized they were this close to demonstrating defiance of Nero’s rule.
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