“We could never build it large enough, Caesar, if the plebs are going to attend.”
Nero rubbed his hands together. His tongue worked one side of his mouth. “Yes, well let’s hope that’s true. We’ll have to settle for a few thousand then. Chosen by lottery. I’ll throw the tokens into the crowd at the Circus.”
“Augustus, you can’t do that,” said Tigellinus, dangerously close to a smile. “You’ll be killed in the stampede!”
“All right then. You arrange it. Just make sure that everyone has an equal chance to come.”
Thirty days to build a city large enough to house a hundred thousand revelers! Only the Roman army driving slaves night and day could do that. The twenty-seventh day it was done. Agrippa's lake, 250 yards long 200 wide, was surrounded by a fantasy of quaint towers, of balconies that overlooked floating gardens where gilded boats were tethered to quays on which musicians played and beautiful, scantily dressed women danced. Taverns were crammed with free food, free wine, brothels with ladies of pleasure, only some of them professionals, many of them daring young women from famous families. Neropolis it was called, city of the senses. It really was astonishingly like Baiae. It was also very much a Saturnalia although that, of course, is held during the icy grip of December not the feverish heat of summer.
As planned its king was Nero himself, jolly and affable under his red cap of freedom, playing the fool and the clown on a barge that was towed around the edge of the lake by gorgeously decorated boats rowed not by stern Roman sailors or grim galley slaves but by fancifully attired, prettily painted male prostitutes. Not once but several times, so that everyone would get a chance to see it, Nero, dressed as a bride, married Pythagoras, his dwarf court jester, who “deflowered” his patron in a semi-transparent muslin tent while the lord of the world, to the delight of his vast audience, made all the appropriate howls of pain and squeals of pleasure, another Saturnalian jest. For three days and two nights Nero’s revels out did even those of his great-grandfather Marc Anthony, darling not only of Cleopatra but all of Alexandria.
It was misrule, madness, the world stood on its head. But the true revolution came on the third night when Nero sang.
Hades was the setting of the musical play Nero had been rehearsing while Neropolis was being built and nothing could possibly have conveyed a more authentic representation of the spectral underworld than Agrippa's lake that night, reflecting as it did the thousand flaring torches on its banks and the half Moon hanging overhead like the scythe of grim old Saturn.
The maw of an expectant silence was filled by a plaintive, swelling melody from the battery of pipe organs that surrounded the lake as a galley, rowed by shadowy figures dressed in funereal black, rippled the shimmering surface as it ferried its passenger from the imperial raft to a second built to look like a desert island. The rowers sang the story of Tantalus who was damned to suffer forever with hunger and thirst for serving up his favorite son to the gods in a stew. No sooner was Nero (who was playing Tantalus) deposited on the island than crashing thunder sent the galley fleeing for the shore. Only the plaintive tune issuing from the pipe organs kept Nero company as he begged to slake his thirst.
He knelt to drink but as he did so there was a roar of rushing water. Sections of the audience panicked. Women screamed. The lake was disappearing right before our eyes. The island-raft to which Nero clung was pitching and rolling in the torrent rushing through sluice gates down to the Tiber. It seemed that he was the only one who was unperturbed as he begged for that sip of water. When the empty wine barrels which floated the island settled, Nero sprang off it and began scratching frantically in the sand. No water! An astonished silence fell over Neropolis as the pipe organs played the discordant notes of despair bordering on madness.
Nero raised his hands towards unforgiving heaven, threw handfuls of sand onto his head. "Dry! Dry! Dry!" he wailed at the top of his register.
Like the distant roar of approaching rain the applause began. Instantly it was a howling thunderstorm of adulation. Ladies bared their breasts. Noble youths who whistled Nero's tunes in the streets exposed themselves. In that magical instant distinctions of rank dissolved. We were all noble, all artists, all Neronians. We’d won the first victory of musical war.
I had taken personal risks supporting Nero’s musical ambitions. If musical war failed, I would fail too. I hadn’t failed. I’d triumphed with my emperor. But for just a few magical moments, I wanted to savor that triumph on my own. I walked away from the lights, out onto a deserted floating pontoon that rocked gently under my feet as I strode to its end. Behind me was music and laughter, above me was the half Moon. The comet was so close to her that it seemed about to caress her face with its long hair. I cried out with joy and opened my heart to heaven. The stars that had screamed discordantly at me the last time I’d done so, that dreadful night Agrippina sent me to murder her son, sang harmoniously now. I embraced them. For one long, glorious moment I felt they were embracing me too, that I was once again the darling of Fate.
A change in the rhythm of its rocking alerted me that someone else was walking on the pontoon. I turned, it was the slight figure of a woman. As she came closer I saw to my relief that it was Rachel. Anyone else would have been an intrusion. I'd been searching for her in the bordellos of Neropolis but she’d found me instead.
Instead of answering my greeting she raised her face to the Moon. Her voice was so faint it seemed to come from another world but it had the ring of utter conviction. "There's no more time," she said. “You saw, you heard. He has sunk to the uttermost depths. See how faint the comet is? When it disappears, so will his world."
“The End Is Near”
July 8 – July 10, 64 A.D.
Something, shock I suppose, cramped my stomach. I leant over the rail and threw up my wine into the lake.
Rachel was still there when I finished. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips seemed to tremble. She reminded me of a woman on the brink of an orgasm. "Epaphroditus, Mark was right, you are indeed chosen. You heeded my warning. You purified yourself. Rejoice. It’s the end of time!"
The purging cleared my head. It seemed she knew something concrete, a date perhaps, when the Christians believed their apocalypse was going to take place. She’d told me they hated Nero, he was their Antichrist. His declaration of musical war must have inflamed that hatred. There were tens of thousands of them among Rome’s teeming millions. What if they were staging some kind of revolt? Rachel moved me, but she was a credulous woman who needed to be protected. Nero must be protected as well. I had to find out what she knew.
"You're intelligent,” I said. “Use your reason. Nero's generals have won him a great victory against the Parthians. The empire is prosperous and at peace. I'll admit the patricians don't like him much but he's worshipped by the plebs. How can you possibly believe that all this is about to end?"
Her lips tightened. "I thought that your eyes had been opened by divine grace, but they haven't." There was genuine regret in her voice. It seemed that she did care for me.
The moment was somehow part of the fantasy of Neronia, with its drunken laughter and ecstatic singing. It was just as emotional. I said, "I don't mean to disappoint you, it's just that I don't understand what I need to do, or why."
Rachel looked up at the comet. "In paradise we will love our neighbors as ourselves. To prove we’re worthy of being admitted, we must first do so in this world. Everything we do follows from that."
"That wouldn't be any good. I don't love myself. Usually I hate myself for not being brave like Julius Caesar, Tiberius even. You were wrong, when I threw up just now, it wasn't because of a revelation. It was because you frightened me. I'm afraid of life with Nero. I'm afraid of life without Nero. I'm frightened of Tigellinus and Poppaea. I hate fear but fear loves me. If I loved my neighbor like myself, I'd hate you. Instead, it's just the opposite."
Although it wasn’t completely sincere, this little speech worked its mischief. Rachel gave me a melting look, took m
y hands in hers. "It's not yourself you hate. It's the evil inside you. It's not me you love, it's the good. When love for him has made you whole, you will love yourself as much as you now believe you love me."
I drew her towards me.
For a moment she allowed me to hold her, even venting a little sigh of regret as she pushed me away. "No, I can't allow the spark of salvation that has been lit within you to be snuffed out in the darkness of the flesh."
Experience had shown that scoffing at Rachel's religious convictions merely alienated her. I tried a different tack. "I need something to help me, to convince me," I said. "Something concrete which makes sense in this world rather than the next. Isn't there anything at all you can give me?"
There was something, I could tell by the way she hesitated. "If you have faith, even if it's no bigger than a mustard seed, you'll be saved."
I turned away, looked back at the lake which was, miraculously, once again full of water. The island was afloat and Nero was being applauded so insistently for another song that he’d already signaled the orchestra to begin the introduction.
"That's the point exactly,” I said. “I don't have faith the size of a mustard seed. I have absolutely none. I used to believe in the stars but I don’t even believe in them anymore. Can't you give me anything, even if it’s nothing more than a clue, to when this miracle is going to happen? "
Her lips brushed my ear, she whispered just one word before she hurried away. “Sirius.”
Early the next morning I called on Balbillus. He kept me waiting half an hour, something I wasn’t used to any more. When he finally had me shown in he was at his desk working on a chart. The paper next to the horoscopic wheel was covered with astrological symbols, some circled, others struck through. He acknowledged my presence with a curt nod. Clearly the way I’d roiled the waters with the diviner Thallus had hurt his professional pride. "What can I do for you?" he asked coldly.
“Sirius,” I said.
He was clearly startled by the word because he looked up sharply. “What about it?”
“What’s Sirius got to do with the end of the world?”
“Nothing at all,” he said, recovering his equanimity. “In May Sirius disappears at sunset. In July it reappears at sunrise. It’s the origin of the Phoenix myth, you know the bird that burns itself and then is reborn from its own ashes. It’s rising is the first day of the Egyptian New Year because it heralds the rising of the Nile. You ought to know all that.”
I did. Phocion had taken me to enough dawn ceremonies in the temple of Isis for that to sink in. “Have you heard of the Christians?” I asked.
“Of course. They’re Jewish heretics.”
“And so you know their Messiah is about to return from the dead and rule the world?”
The astrologer smiled, something his gravity didn’t allow him to do very often. “So I’ve heard. Do you know when?”
“They say it’s very soon.”
Balbillus’s calm eyes appraised me. “But you have an actual date, haven’t you?”
“I was hoping you’d could find it for me. It has something to do with Sirius.”
“Sirius reappears just before the Sun on July 19. Is that soon enough for you?”
“Not July 18?”
“Perhaps with extraordinary viewing conditions. Why then?”
“It’s Rome’s unluckiest day, isn’t it?
“Yes. The anniversary of the day the Gauls slaughtered the Roman army just outside the city. But it’s ill omened. No one starts a new project on that day. I’m sure not even the Christians will do that.”
“But they hate Rome. It might be an auspicious day for them.”
Balbillus sat back in his chair. His hand pinched the point of his chin. His eyes narrowed just perceptibly as he ran a finger down the ephemeris of planetary positions in the codex open on his desk. “The seventeenth is the night of the full Moon.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that on the eighteenth she is waning and therefore vindictive.”
“So?”
“If you’ll excuse me, I’ll find out.”
That evening Nero, dressed in a bridal gown and kept company only by the wordless harmonies of an invisible choir, sang the part of Psyche waiting in a charmed palace for the arrival of what she supposed to be her hideous serpent-bridegroom.
I noticed Rachel shudder with disgust and slip away. It was my turn to follow her. She climbed into a gardener's wagon that was taking its load of cuttings for incineration on the other side of the Tiber. Now that it was night, the streets of Rome were full of the tradesmen's carts and wagons forbidden during the day. This made it easy for me to follow without being observed. I took the risk of going alone.
The wagon crossed the Tiber at the Aemelian bridge and then headed south to a riverside refuse dump. Rachel, and a man I presumed to be a gardener, walked quickly down a path that wound into the center of the dump. There, lit by the fitful glow of the smoldering waste which rose up like hills on every side, perhaps a hundred people sat at the feet of a man who harangued them in a patois of Latin and Greek, the language of the street. He wore the dark brown tunic of the humblest of slaves and in spite of the crate he was standing on he looked short. Unkempt tawny hair tumbled down his back, a red unclipped beard covered his face. His large eyes rolled under bushy eyebrows. He was Mark the Lion.
I took a wax tablet out of my satchel. Careful to hide what I was doing in shadow, I took down what he said.
"And when that trumpet sounds, what will happen?" Mark’s deep voice rumbled. "Look about you, that's what will happen. When the moment comes, the things of this world will become trash. Not only the things of this world, but the people of this world as well. Those who are not filled with the holy spirit will be cast aside like cracked and useless vessels. They will be cast into the fire. A mighty fire that will descend from heaven and consume the world of the Beast, a fire that enraptures the pure but tortures the impure throughout eternity."
The hundred voices spoke as one. "Amen."
The speaker pointed at the comet, now only a faint smudge of light. "You have beheld it with your own eyes, the angel the almighty has sent flying down from heaven with the key to the bottomless pit. He grows faint because he is near his goal. Soon he will plunge below the earth down to the gates of Hell. He will unlock the triple locks and free the souls of the blessed so that they may rise up from the abyss and with a mighty cry cast down the Beast. Will you help them?"
A hundred mouths shouted the answer. "We shall!"
"Behold, the heavens will open and Christ will appear mounted on a white horse. His eyes will flash fire and his robe will be stained with blood. He will order the angels to seize the Beast and cast him alive into an ever-burning lake of fire and brimstone where he'll suffer torment for eternity."
"Amen."
"Beware that you do not share the Fate of the Beast and those who wear the mark of the Beast. Shun therefore all music other than hymns. Shun the books of the pagans for they are the dust of a dead world. Shun the theater because its vanity and silliness distracts the mind from holiness. Shun the Circus lest, while your attention is on a green chariot or a blue, you fail to see the chariots of the prophets riding down from heaven.
"Here is the essence of what you must do to be saved: Whatever it is the Beast rejoices in, that you must avoid. For the Beast is the opposite of our savior. Where our savior is the Christ the Beast is the Antichrist. And who is this Beast? His name is a number and the number is 666. Let him who has the understanding discover the one for which this number stands."
I Visit The Christians
July 11, 64 A.D.
"Who does it stand for?" Nero asked me.
It was the next morning. I'd rehearsed the story of being contacted in the dead of night by a stranger who led me to a secret meeting of the followers of the mysterious savior whose appearance was announced by the comet.
Nero had listened to my transcription of the mee
ting with rapt attention, broken only by his frequent glances into the mirror to see how his hair curling was coming on.
I’d guessed, of course, but I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. "I don't know, dominus."
Nero's fingertip patted the dab of paper on his chin that sealed a razor snick. "This savior of yours sounds like a rather dull person while I rather like the sound of your Beast. I simply must have him over for dinner before he's cast into that lake of everlasting fire. Bring me Julius Alexander. He's a Jew, at least he used to be. He might know where to reach him."
Tiberius Julius Alexander was waiting outside with the throng of dignitaries from everywhere in the empire who were attending Nero's morning reception. He'd been procurator of Judea six years previously and since his recent return from the Armenian front had been one of Nero's advisors on Jewish affairs.
His face was wreathed in smiles at the honor of being admitted into Nero’s dressing room. "Warmest salutations Augustus."
Nero opened his right hand in greeting. "Morning Alexander. I have a riddle for you. Tell him, Epaphroditus."
"It's a number that is also a name," I said. "The number is 666."
Alexander's quick eyes darted between my face and Nero's. "Allow me to suppose that the very fact that you have put this riddle to me first is a clue. Am I correct?"
Nero nodded. He was enjoying this little game. "Very astute, Alexander."
"How do I differ from the others paying you court this morning? Perhaps in that my background is Jewish."
"Right again."
Alexander pulled a comical face. "All to no avail, Caesar. I'm afraid I'm no Oedipus and I must now obediently go to my death."
The Nero Prediction Page 18
