Boy Caesar

by Jeremy Reed

  When he fought free of the last of his minders he was grateful of the chance to be alone. A big wind had risen outside, and he could hear it thrashing through the trees, like trampling elephants.

  He slept as if he was on the high seas, the current of his dreams washing him with turbulent rhythm. He woke once to find his mother trying to fit herself to his body, and it took real force on his part to kick her out of his bed.

  He awoke to discover that the wind had died out, and the view from his windows was one of spectacular blossom. For all the pink and white cushioning of the trees, he could sense the manic graft of the city on the other side, and all the crazy night-and-day excitement it offered. The first thought in his mind was that he would have attendants search the bath-houses and gymnasiums for youths who were well hung. He intended to make it clear from the start that his preference was for solid genital muscle. It meant nothing to him that his obsession might be frowned on by the prejudiced.

  But before the day began he was to be visited by his personal hairdresser, whose job it was to layer and curl his hair in the style originally adopted by Nero. The day’s busy agenda was also to include an introduction to the Senate, the body politic he despised without ever having met.

  After he had washed he was dressed by his Ethiopian servant. The man, who gave his name as Antony, was anxious to please without being in the least subservient. Sensitive to a degree that palpably flinched from the possibilities of being hurt, his manner combined tact with genuine concern. Heliogabalus assumed the man was in his mid-twenties and had probably been raised as a servant. He had mint-green eyes, and his body was slim to the point of self-conscious definition. But what made Antony so particularly special was the selfless, self-deprecating way in which his desire to please was without the expectation of gain. It was a quality absent from the servants he had known at home and one he had not counted on finding in Rome.

  For a moment he wondered what it would feel like to fall in love with him. He let his eye track the curved rondure of the man’s buttocks before taking up with the shapely outline of his thighs. The compact tightness of his body contrasted with the soft expression in his eyes, creating the exact combination of masculine and feminine energies he found irresistible. He felt a catch in his heart as Antony attended to his personal needs, and was at the same time acutely aware that society would refuse him the right to love this man, no matter the truth of his feelings.

  He listened as Antony told him of the large number of public readings currently on in Rome. Poets and philosophers used recitations not only as a means of propagating their work but also as a valuable form of income. There was to be a series of readings that afternoon at the Athenaeum, its auditorium having been converted into a platform for the city’s revolutionary poets. According to Antony, most of them performed to backing bands, the music working in tandem with the lyrics.

  He took time in putting on his jewellery. He eventually settled for a number of pins in his hair and a selection of glitzy sparklers on his knuckles. The Senate was unlikely to approve, but that was half the fun. Defiance and the refusal to conform were coded into him like a blood type.

  Antony’s eyes bumped up at the sight of the rings, his slightly arched eyebrow signalling that they were a little too outré, while his silent amusement was a clear indicator that he had given them his personal approval.

  Heliogabalus still felt road-lagged and secretly dreaded having to attend the Colisseum later in the day to witness the gladiator shows put on in the amphitheatre as part of the celebrations. The barbaric blood-letting cruelty of the displays were renowned for their savagery. He had heard that animals and humans were carved up like meat in the arena. It wasn’t something he relished seeing, and the enthusiasm expected of him would have to be faked in the interests of pleasing the crowd.

  When Antony came up close to make a final check on his appearance he traced a finger lightly along the small of his back and met with no resistance. There was no sudden tensing or movement away on his part. The naturalness of his response told him that there were no obstacles in the way of their having sex later that night. Already he could feel the fit of their perfectly matched bodies.

  He picked at a fruit bowl before wandering out to the sunlit terrace. His strappy sandals were bound to cause a sensation, but he didn’t care. The Roman light was clear, busy and atomized with charge. The whole scented parkland rose to his nostrils. When his mother came out to join him he could read in her dissolute features the years of heavy drinking and sex to which she was addicted. She ran a finger playfully along his smoothly shaved jaw, reminding him at the same time of the necessity for him to continue with his education. He was to resume studies with Serge and was to be taught etiquette, history and some law as a means of consolidating his position.

  He was full of his own immediate plans to build a temple to his god and told Symiamira of his intention to visit the Senate in a carriage drawn by naked youths. The gesture would shock, but it was all part of his image. He had come to Rome to subvert the existing hierarchy and intended to do so with style. He was determined within a month to call a convention of all the city’s prostitutes, male and female, and to preside over the meeting in a warehouse on the docks. He had planned the whole thing during his time on the road; and now it was simply a matter of feeding it into his agenda.

  Downtown he found the streets infested with people. They stopped in their tracks to watch him pass, and already he could see the look of disapproval in their faces. While the youths who carried him looked festively camp and wore ostrich feathers around their necks and waists, the message was nevertheless clear. He could hear laughter and disparagement interspersed with the general popularity his presence excited. Rome was alive, and its cosmopolitan inhabitants were all purposefully headed for their groove in the city. Part of his pleasure lay in sighting faces that he considered attractive. They came from every nationality, although it was the distinctive Roman boys to whom he paid attention. Making a note of the local boys was important, for he intended to have sex with as many of them as his energies permitted.

  His eye picked out a florist’s stall under one of the arches, and the youth selling flowers was just his type. He was busy grouping blue irises for a customer, but for some reason he looked up when Heliogabalus was passing, and their eyes met. It was his first direct eye-conquest of the day, and he would ask Antony’s advice about how best to win the boy over. He was excited now, and the thrill of it all had him put the meeting with the Senate out of his mind. He had little or no interest in government, and it was primarily for sexual kicks that he had come to Rome. Here everything awaited him, and his excitement was uncontainable.

  There were girls, too, who caught his eye, hair piled up in elaborate constructs, bodies made off-limits by the hauteur with which they screened out the invasive spectator. They walked in a way quite different from the Syrians, who were lazier in their indolent emphasis on the hips. He liked the pretty blondes with their inscrutable green eyes and hieratic gestures.

  The way to Senate House was his first real taste of the city. He could sight the up and down sides of the chaotic metropolis and longed to be left alone to explore the slums and dockside areas. It was there that he knew he would find the rent boys for whom he was looking. He wanted real life in the form of sailors, thieves and those who had invented themselves according to the mythic terms of the underworld.

  The exact and rigid system that comprised the senatorial order was of the sort he inwardly despised. The elitist landowners fed off the food chain of slave labour. They were the fat cats who sat on top of the social pyramid. While it was within his power to appoint a senator to act as legate or proconsul in most of the important provinces, to administer the chief services of the city or to hold the higher posts in the priesthood, he was aware that his powers of appointment were limited. He disliked them for the stranglehold they had on all dissenting factions. Their networking was responsible in his mind for the likes of Antony being subjug
ated to the role of servant. He objected immediately to their imperiousness and absurd sense of self-importance. By contrast, he felt grateful to Serge for having always reminded him of the need for humility as a check on ambition.

  He could tell straight away that the Senate were suspicious of his motives and the strategies he had prepared. His announcement that he was to build an Eastern-style temple to his god in the suburbs rather than the capital, and that his own religion was to take precedence over Mithraism, was greeted with a note of silent disapproval. Worse was to follow, and he had deliberately saved his lemon-squeezer effect until last: his demand that women should be permitted to enter the Senate was greeted with open hostility. He proposed setting up a women’s senate, on the Quirinal Hill, to be presided over by his mother. It was the chance for which he had been waiting, and the effects were devastating. Most of the assembly rose to their feet in protest, except for one who remained seated and applauding his proposal. He wondered who this was who dared entertain the courage to differ from his opinionated colleagues. He decided then and there that he had most probably found a friend and would reward the individual by asking him to dinner at a later date.

  Having scored a spectacular personal victory with these innovative and unpopular measures he decided to appease the Senate’s anger by promising to make gifts to the public. He made it clear that he was to open a public baths in the palace and to make the baths of Plautianus available to the people. He was to have coins minted and distributed to his subjects as well as reprieving criminals tried under Macrinus. These were the general measures expected of him, and on this score he was anxious not to offend.

  He was high for having acquitted himself so well and felt that despite his vulnerability he hadn’t faltered. He had always trusted in real personal conviction having the edge on those who lived by received opinions. It was the force of his beliefs that had carried the day. The rest of the proceedings were given over to judicial trivia in which he took no interest.

  His business over, he asked for a detour to be made on the route back to the palace. He wanted to explore the dockside complex and sniff out his future territory. The river’s ropy smell had left him fascinated. It came up in the air with the pungent scent of pollution. He longed to see its vertebrae uncoil and the great force of it run with the sky on its back.

  The youths carrying him set off in good humour. Once again there were crowds lining the pavements, staring out with the flat faces of tourists confused by the difference between what they had anticipated and what they were actually seeing. Most of them appeared fazed by his pop-star appearance. He had the impression that he moved through the crowds like a hallucination. He was the purple and gold image responsible for distorting their visual field. Unable to contain him, he knew they would invent a language to describe him, and this in turn would have a knock-on effect in creating the legend he intended to become.

  They left the city centre with its congested traffic and negotiated a passage through a grid of bulky warehouses. There were workers everywhere shouldering sacks and crates, most of them stripped to the waist in the blond April sunlight. He could smell the fusion of spices and river sewage now, and it was direct in his face. The sensory input was raw and abrasive, and the information carried to his groin.

  He could hear stevedores shouting out instructions as they unloaded a red-hulled cargo ship in from the East. He knew that the cargo would contain, amongst other things, spices, perfumes, dyes, slaves and thick black Indian hair used in the making of wigs. He was excited by the feeling of risk generated by being in the precinct. The maleness, the foreigners, the cutting-edge sense of danger, they all came together in his blood like a drug. Then there was the river, and his first proper sighting of its pythonic coils and muddy undertow dragged out of the hills. There was a wind frisking a blue finish to the mud-whisked surface. There were a number of ships moored to the nearside dock: big, alien and alarming as extraterrestrial visitors. They looked to him like craft arrived from the near planets as a prelude to a take-over. Gulls harassed the rigging and dived in hysterical forays for offal. He hadn’t heard or seen these birds before and was suspicious of their yellow-eyed aggression and their querulously guttural diction. They were like a mob without camaraderie as they fought over whatever disjecta membra the current turned up.

  Surveying the territory, he asked to be taken into a yard behind a restructured warehouse. After the continuous spotlight he had faced at the Senate, he felt the need to dissolve into shadows. He asked for only one minder to accompany him in his mapping out of sexual territory. He knew the madness and danger involved in such an enterprise but couldn’t help himself. He could be killed on the spot or subjected to humiliating ridicule by a gang of workers, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t cure himself of the habit, and that was his kick. He should have been back in the comfort and security of his quarters, instead of exploring the oily-dark underbelly of a dockside warehouse.

  He kept with a gold stripe of sunlight that advanced like a probe into the building. From where he stood he could make out the crouched figure of a docker sitting resting on top of a packing crate. The man seemed contracted into himself like a closed accordion. He could hear him breathing, his naked torso polished with sweat in the grainy dark. Even in the half-light he could see that the man was dark-skinned and perfectly proportioned.

  He continued going forward, the risk firing his heart, its beat so loud it was like amplified bass. The place was stocked with grain-sacks packed tight with their cereal contents. He was glad the light went in all the way to the interior. He had half a mind to turn back, before it was too late. He felt unable to breathe. His chest was knotted. The dark was suffocating, and for a moment he associated the laser-beam of sunlight with his own life-force. He had the terror that if one went out the other would follow.

  The man had sensed him now and was defensive of his territory. He was clearly skiving and frightened of being found out and flogged. He had all the instinctual alertness of an animal surprised in its lair. He sat up rigid, clearly prepared to jump off the chest and run.

  Heliogabalus didn’t falter. It was too late now. He kept his eyes fixed on the man and dropped his shoulders low as a sign that he intended no hostility. He wondered what the response would be when the man saw him dressed as emperor. And, excited as he was, he had already decided to put aside the idea of sex. Venturing into the dark and coming on to the man was sufficient. He knew that if he took it a step further and the man resisted then his minder might run him through. He didn’t want the man to die in this way. The two had formed an almost complicitous pact in the dark, scenting each other out and sharing the apprehension of the act. He wanted to leave it at that and back out while there was still time. He drew out whatever money he had on him and threw it in the direction of the stranger. There was the muffled sound of coins pinking on the stone floor in a series of dispersed ricochets.

  He turned around immediately and made for the open door, imagining he was going back into the light after having participated in one of the mystery cults. He felt stronger for the encounter, no matter his sense of sexual disappointment. Rome, he knew, offered him everything, but his first attraction had been to an unknown docker taking time out in a corporate-owned warehouse.

  Outside he was glad of the zingy river air. Only one person had witnessed his frustrated attempt to make a conquest of rough trade, and he wasn’t bothered. If the man wasn’t anyway similarly inclined, then it was unlikely he would dare talk. So intense was the experience that he felt he had entered a pocket of missing time and was coming back to a different sort of reality.

  They went back through the city in the late afternoon light, its mix of pink and gold pointing up the buildings. Their progress was deliberately slow, and when they got back it was early evening. An abrupt hailstorm seethed across the park, the atomized ice hitting target like miniature ping-pong balls. The shower seemed to come out of nowhere, with all the blustery assault of April weather.

&n
bsp; Back in his palatial suite he settled to a deep scented soak, but not before he had requested a dinner based on dishes made popular by Apicius. He knew that he would hardly touch the food, but the aesthetic was important. He ordered sows’ breasts with Lybian truffles, peacock’s tongues flavoured with cinnamon, oysters stewed in garum, sturgeons from Rhodes, fig-peckers from Samos and African snails. The variety was like creating a menu from the various components of his empire. He would pick at it and order that the rest should go to his staff.

  The hot water reached him everywhere a lover should. He abandoned himself to weightlessness and the juniper scouring-oil. The scent got right into him and stayed there like a tonic. It had him long to explore Italy’s forests and to go deep into the Bacchic mysteries, with their emphasis on sexual frenzy.

  After a while he called for Antony to bring towels into the room. He fought with the idea of telling him about his experience at the docks earlier in the day, imagining he would find a sympathetic ear. Even if he had been instructed by his mother never to confide in servants, he knew there was always the exception. He felt the necessity of having someone in whom to confide, and Antony seemed that person.

  When he came into the room he knew he had chosen right. Antony didn’t appear in the least disturbed by his nudity, and his green eyes took in everything with tact and sympathy. Heliogabalus flopped lazily, his chin appearing to rest on the surface. His body felt elastic and his mind fine-tuned. He basked in the pleasure of being alone in his own space and one that he was prepared to share only with his valet. He felt like a fish scrubbed of its scales, the filigree bones hidden by a soft membrane of skin. He had journeyed across rivers, streams and oceans to arrive on the banks of the Tiber, exhausted but alive, his colours still vibrant, the mud washed off his body.