Boy Caesar

by Jeremy Reed

  They drove back through a city that had suddenly come alive. The centre was congested, and someone, probably claiming to be a prophet or a messiah, had attracted a crowd who formed an attentive hub at the man’s feet. Heliogabalus’ own admiration for the miracle-worker Apollonius of Tyana, about whom he had read, made him sympathetic to all myth-makers providing they didn’t challenge his rights as caesar.

  Back at the palace he was immediately informed by the centurion responsible for the man’s arrest of Carus’ attempts to trigger a revolution. The Army wanted the man executed as an example of what happened to those who tried to subvert the emperor’s rule. And, to make matters worse, Hierocles was up and about, insisting that his word was law when Caesar was absent.

  Part of Heliogabalus resented the way the incident had been blown up out of all proportion, largely, he suspected, to satisfy the instincts of the morally vindictive. When he entered the hall where judgement was to take place, he could see a badly made-up Hierocles sitting in the place reserved for the emperor. He was sprawled in his seat in an undignified manner, his eyes looking blotchy and wasted.

  It was a bad start to proceedings, and when Heliogabalus took his place next to Hierocles he could feel the silent disapproval of the soldiers burn him like a rash cobbled across his skin. His friend’s presence and the embarrassment it caused placed him at an immediate disadvantage, and the undertow could be heard in a brief snatch of laughter that came from somewhere near the back of the hall. If it had been left up to him he would simply have had the criminal banished from Rome and sent to one of the islands. He despised capital punishment and the whole judicial machinery it set in progress. When he looked at Carus he could scent the man’s fear coating him like a glaze on a pot. He assessed his age as about thirty; muscular build, long eyelashes for a man, coarse features, and his misfired cause suddenly gone dead in him. He wondered if Carus had ever really believed in his short-lived rebellion and how he would have benefited even if he had been successful in promoting Alexander’s cause. When Heliogabalus hesitantly made eye contact with him there was a brief flickering attempt on Carus’ part to keep his attention. He knew without doubt that the man was resting his entire appeal on the hope of the emperor’s clemency.

  The case was presented with a remorseless, clinical bias. A number of potential conspirators from the Alban Legion had been arrested for questioning, but all had denied playing any part in the scheme. The onus for the attempted assassination fell squarely and conclusively on Carus’ shoulders. Any attempt to depose the emperor, the prosecution stated, was answerable by death.

  When Heliogabalus glanced at the man again Carus was impertinent enough to return his look with a smile. The centurion next to him immediately slapped his face for daring to be insolent, and in that brief moment of violence he saw with restrained anger what it was like for one man to be humiliated by another’s authority. When Hierocles made a brief protest, he stamped on his foot to silence him. He couldn’t risk angering the Army by having his partner attempt to intervene on Carus’ part. To interfere now would be to risk the reprisal of a military coup.

  The evidence presented appeared irrefutable. When Carus was allowed to speak it was with the confused air of somebody who had already been spoken for. He looked shocked to have heard the contents of his mind described by a stranger. He had no defence other than that he had never intended the emperor’s death and was being accused of a charge that couldn’t be substantiated. He spoke like a man in the process of catching himself out lying, as he went off at a tangent that refused to add either conviction or eloquence to his case. That he had lost the plot was apparent in the way his source quickly dried up like a stream in a time of torrid drought. That he knew he wasn’t being believed only added to his lack of belief in what he was saying.

  Heliogabalus looked away. He wanted to dematerialize and leave them to their sordid business. Justice, he knew, was simply the code that suited the oppressor. The oppressed lived by different laws, equally pertinent to their cause but existing as the reverse values to a society rooted in received notions of justice.

  Carus was shouting now, but his words lacked the adhesive to stick. They were being dragged out of a core threatened by extinction and lacked all context. Heliogabalus felt Hierocles take his hand as Carus began to lose dignity and break down. Every cell in the man’s body was opposing the prospect of death with instinctual resistance. ‘I am innocent of any crime,’ he appealed, his voice resounding against the marble walls. ‘I am a soldier, loyal to Caesar.’

  The prosecution didn’t waste any time. Heliogabalus could smell the acrid reek of wine on the lawyer’s breath as he came up close and said, ‘The crime is punishable by death. We await your sentence.’

  Heliogabalus heard the assembly go silent, the way a town does when it snows. He hated the prosecution for conferring upon him the responsibility for Carus’ death, knowing that if he declared him innocent then he was likely to spark an uprising. The contempt he felt for the whole affair showed in his indifference to proceedings. He looked away diffidently, pretending the matter was beneath him, and by the briefest nod signed away Carus’ life to appease the military.

  He had known since his earliest education with the monks at Emesa that the nature of reality is death. Only the theatrical world of high camp, with its extravagant attention to superfluous detail, had ever allowed him to escape from an awareness he had learned too young. He would like to have told all those present that their own deaths were as potentially imminent as Carus’, only they were spared for the moment by reason of luck, health or political correctness.

  Instead, he couldn’t wait to get out of the hall and away from the reek of soldiers. He felt coated by issues concerning the right and wrong use of justice and the impossibility of ever making inroads into the existing system.

  Hierocles followed him out and, accompanied by his minders, Heliogabalus made for the park with its shady avenues of junipers, pines, poplars, planes, ilexes, magnolias, hornbeams and oaks. He needed to be outside and in the presence of nature as a means of finding peace. If Carus wasn’t already dead, then his execution was imminent. He tried to imagine what the exact moment of shutdown was like and if it was really true that the whole of one’s past life was flash-forwarded for review. He thought of the purple cords braided with gold that he had ready in the event of having to hang himself and how at night he would run a hand reassuringly over the softened fibre, just to know his death-kit was ready and prepared. There was also his scarab ring, filled with sufficient poison to stop his heart within minutes. To live it was necessary to know how to die, and he had been instructed in the methods best suited to an emperor faced with the exigency of suicide.

  He chose a spot of deep-blue shade in a concealed oak grove as a convenient place to take refuge from prying eyes. His attendants laid out cushions on which to sit and produced a range of chilled wines packed in ice-buckets. Two servants holding fans made out of peacock’s feathers stood over him and batted the air into a liberating breeze. A salad was offered of squat lettuce sprinkled with mint and sliced eggs garnishing lizard-fish served with rue. There were beans, tender young sprouts and ham, but the afternoon’s proceedings had left him without appetite. He needed above all to be alone, but his life rarely allowed him this luxury. Hierocles had started to drink again, presumably to sober himself up, and Heliogabalus dreaded the consequences of him growing progressively drunker. He felt he couldn’t take any more hurt, any more abuse aimed at undermining his self-esteem. He wondered why his friend hated himself to such a degree that he felt compelled to turn it around on his lover. His vicious diatribes seemed like the irrepressible anger of someone consumed by self-loathing.

  He closed his eyes so as to avoid being drawn into conversation and to re-establish contact with himself. As he lay back drowsing in the shade he had a vision. A huge black snake had emerged from its place of concealment in the undergrowth. As it pushed upwards, uncoiling like a rope, so the sun appeared to
come closer, as if the two were attracted to each other, only the sun had turned black as it does at the moment of eclipse. He continued to look on as the two narrowed in distance. The snake had his colours, purple and gold for fangs, and triggered like a giant phallus to meet the sun’s collision course. The whole thing was happening audio-visually, and he could hear the intense roar of the disorbited planet rushing through space. He felt like his brain was frying as the heat was turned up like the recreation of Big Bang. The snake and the sun continued to move in on each other with what seemed like equal speed. He could feel acute sexual tension firing in his groin and sensed he would never be able to survive the impact when they collided. The orgasm built towards detonation as the snake drove its fangs into the sun. To his amazement the sun, on swallowing the snake, changed into its streamlined shape and spat out the black, bullet-shaped meteorite he had recognized as his god in Emesa and brought with him all those miles to Rome. As the conical stone hurtled earthwards, so he came in a manner so explosive that he gasped at the excruciating intensity.

  He was so overwhelmed by the experience that, ignoring Hierocles and his minders, he walked off by himself into the wood. A woodpecker broke free of cover and took off with low irregular flight for a place of deeper concealment. He followed it into the trees, the shade closing over him like a dark green sea. The right to be alone was what he wanted, although he suspected that Antony was sighting him from a discreet distance, watching out for him as was his way.

  He could smell earth scents, and a deep litter of dried acorns crackled underfoot. All of nature’s regenerative coding went on unobserved in its abundantly restorative way, right from the trumpet-shaped convolvulus that was strangleholding a sapling to the little red campion seeded by a bird. He stood communicating with the ecosystem at his feet and taking in the diversity of small lives that lived in this earth like pores in skin. It reminded him of the unnaturalness of his life, and while he couldn’t strip himself down to anything like an instinctive response to nature he was none the less aware he was engaged in a learning process.

  He stayed listening in the clearing, and this time the woodpecker emitted a cry that sounded like insane laughter. He had read somewhere in Pliny that its raucous package of notes was an early warning of rain to follow. He looked for the bird, but it was hidden from view.

  He could feel the temperature had dropped. Coincidental with the woodpecker’s shriek, a burst of white lightning showed through the trees, a zigzag of charged ions, the voltage of which left him stunned. He turned around abruptly in response to the sign and hurried back towards the company he had left picknicking in sunlight.

  8

  Jim hadn’t found it necessary to tell Masako the worst of his ordeal. She seemed to know instinctively that he would tell her when the time was right, and he had been grateful to sit shaking on her floor, drinking the hot tea she had provided and slowly catching up with himself, rather than having to apologize for what happened.

  Now in Rome together, he realized that her intuition spread a sensitive network through every aspect of his life. It wasn’t just that she was by nature unintrusive, it was more that she appeared to assess her thoughts in a deep level before deciding to speak. It seemed to him that she possessed the faculty not only to tune into his mood but to make allowance for every nuance of its inconsistencies. Danny had always ruffled him in ways that causes friction. Masako, by way of contrast, disliked confrontation and had clearly erased the need for it within herself. There was a quiet shimmer to her emotions that pleased him, a vibration that kept count of the deeper things in life as well as the everyday.

  Watching her now, sitting with her legs arched on the bed as she painted her toenails a vibrant red, he loved the boyishness of her thin shoulders and flat torso, the black flounce of her page-boy cut with its purple fringe and the convexity of her buttocks as they described a perfect width and proportion. He liked the fact that the masculine and feminine components of her body were each sharply identifiable, so that she formed an easily recognizable androgyne.

  They had been fortunate to have a friend loan them the use of his apartment on the Via degli Avignonesi, a quiet back street that runs parallel to Via del Tritone. The single-bedroom flat was light and minimally furnished. Two dense eucalyptus trees shared their window on the city, their hard green leaves forming a link with nature in the urban, petrochemicalized landscape.

  Jim, who still hadn’t slept with Masako, turned his erotic focus on the bottle of vermilion Shiseido lacquer that she was using to paint her toes. It was the colour of geraniums and red peppers and autumns in New England. Without saying a word he knelt down and took her arched foot in his hand, its smallness fitting his palm, the three painted toenails in the process of drying an intense scarlet. Holding her foot in his left hand, he took the brush in his right and began texturing one of the unpainted toes with red gloss. He felt her thrill at the contact, as though he was manipulating a powerful erogenous zone. She closed her eyes and abandoned herself to the sensation, her foot coming alive as an instrument of pleasure. Jim deliberately took his time in applying a signature to each of the two toenails. He worked meticulously and slowly, keyboarding the foot from time to time with his left hand in response to the little cries bottled in Masako’s throat.

  Letting go her left foot, he took hold of her still unpainted right, the sole tensing on contact with his hand. He could feel the expectation run through her like a charge.

  This time she lay back, completely given over to the esoteric vocabulary of pedic sex. Intuition taught him the routes to follow, and by the softest manipulation of the sole he was cupping he found himself able to attune Masako to pleasure. He continued all the time to paint her toenails the livid Matisse red, stopping only when her foot contracted from sensory overload and locked on the stimulus.

  Glossing her big toe to a berry shine, he jabbed the brush back in the bottle’s viscous contents and traced one finger the entire length of her sole, drawing from her the sound of a wounded viola. He had never conceived of the foot as a soundboard for erotic pleasure and felt challenged by discovering the potential in Masako to orgasm through this particular fetish.

  He could hear a siren tracking through the city, its urgent signal parting traffic, as he returned to scrutinizing the complex map of highways written across Masako’s sole. Her foot had the soft texture and colouring of a magnolia petal, the same purple veins dissolved into an ivory backdrop. It seemed to have a life of its own and to be sensitive to each exploratory tweak of his fingertips. He massaged it gently, learning by experiment to connect with the pleasure spots. He worked with the fineness and precision of a mapmaker at his task, extending his line across uncharted territory and backtracking where the response elicited was acute. He could see the dampness spreading through the black fan of Masako’s hair and feel the orgasm coming up in her like a wave riding with inexorable momentum for shore. When it broke, she arched her body off the bed, convulsed by its sizzling delivery.

  Jim let go of her foot and lay down beside her on the bed’s terracotta-coloured linen cover. Her entire skin, he decided, was just like a magnolia flower, unblemished by the least scar or discoloration. Her foot, as an extension of this line, was a tabula rasa on which he had performed a cartographer’s art, connecting the meridians to her sexual core.

  They lay together silently, her depilated body resembling a young boy’s, her blacked-out eyes casting shadows each time she blinked. The sonic roar from the city surfed into the room and meshed with the noise inside Jim’s brain. Even though Masako had encouraged him to explore the gay scene in Rome he had stayed away, finding in her company sufficient interest to burn a hole through the busy days. Being in the city had generated an excitement in his nerves that kept him on a permanent high, both for its associations with Heliogabalus and because of the distance it put between him and Danny and his underworld associates. He could feel the weight of their dead relationship dropping from him day by day, no matter the pain that
came up as a reminder of loss.

  With Masako taking a brief siesta before they went out sightseeing, he busied himself reading through his recent notes on Heliogabalus’ involvement in the mystery religions. Masako had turned over and was sleeping face down, and his eye was drawn to the little red heart tattooed above the crack of her bottom, an image so discreet, and at the same time loaded with sexual connotations, that he triggered erect with hard impromptu lust. Redirecting his attention back to his work, he savoured the sweet expectation that comes of denial and promised himself that if ever the time was right he would follow the tattoo as the directive to entering her body.

  In recent weeks Jim had been preoccupied by the events leading up to Heliogabalus’ decision to arrange a marriage for his god, an event that followed close on the heels of his own improvident marriage to Annia Faustina. Research had told him that for the union of deities the emperor had chosen the Carthaginian divinity Caelestis as bride for Elagabal. Recognized in Rome as the queen of the heavens, Caelestis was a variant form of the Phoenician Astarte. Her image had been brought to Rome and transported to the Elagaballium with immense ceremony, and the ritual marriage of the two deities had taken place in the temple. Jim’s knowledge of the subject told him that Heliogabalus had chosen well, as the goddess was not only the chief divinity of Carthage but was widely known in North Africa and elsewhere around the Mediterranean basin. She also had a cult following in Rome, her worship having been established by Septimius Severus. Her popularity apart, Jim guessed that the emperor may also have been motivated in his decision by the enormous wealth attracted to Caelestis’ temple. Commentaries differed as to the emperor’s motives in arranging this marriage, and Jim liked best the report that Heliogabalus would accept nothing but two golden lions to mark the occasion, the spiritual significance of the event proving sufficient for his ends. He imagined the emperor being handed the lions on a jewelled leash and his sense of exaggerated style leading to them being fitted with tiaras and dressed in purple coats to match his toga.