Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “With what result? He boasts he has killed no less than twelve hundred poor devils with his own hand in the arena. True, he takes the pseudonym of Paulus when he kills lions with his javelin and drives a chariot in the races like a vulgar slave. But everybody knows, and he picks slaves for his ministers — consider that vile beast Cleander, whom even the rabble refused to endure another day. I don’t see that Marcia’s influence amounts to much.”

  “But Cleander was executed finally. You are in a glum mood, Sextus.

  What has happened to upset you?”

  “It is the nothing that has happened. There has come no answer to that letter I wrote to my father in Rome. Commodus’s informers may have intercepted it.”

  Norbanus whistled softly. The skewbald Cappadocian mistook that for a signal to exert himself and for a minute there were ructions while his master reined him in.

  “When did you write?” he demanded, when he had the horse under control again.

  “A month ago.”

  Norbanus lapsed into a moody silence, critically staring at his friend when he was sure the other was not looking. Sextus had always puzzled him by running risks that other men (himself, for instance) steadfastly avoided, and avoiding risks that other men thought insignificant. To write a letter critical of Commodus was almost tantamount to suicide, since every Roman port and every rest-house on the roads that led to Rome had become infested with informers who were paid on a percentage basis.

  “Are you weary of life?” he asked after a while.

  “I am weary of Commodus — weary of tyranny — weary of lies and hypocrisy — weary of wondering what is to happen to Rome that submits to such bestial government — weary of shame and of the insolence of bribe-fat magistrates—”

  “Weary of your friends?” Norbanus asked. “Don’t you realize that if your letter fell into the hands of spies, not only will you be proscribed and your father executed, but whoever is known to have been intimate with you or with your father will be in almost equal danger? You should have gone to Rome in person to consult your father.”

  “He ordered me to stay here to protect his interests. We are rich,

  Norbanus. We have much property in Antioch and many tenants to oversee.

  I am not one of these modern irreligious wastrels; I obey my father—”

  “And betray him in an idiotic letter!”

  “Very well! Desert me while there is time!” said Sextus angrily.

  “Don’t be a fool! You are not the only proud man in the empire, Sextus. I don’t desert my friend for such a coward’s reason as that he acted thoughtlessly. But I will tell you what I think, whether or not that pleases you, if only because I am your true friend. You are a rash, impatient lover of the days gone by, possessed of genius that you betray by your arrogant hastiness. So now you know what I think, and what all your other friends think. We admire — we love our Sextus, son of Maximus. And we confess to ourselves that our lives are in danger because of that same Sextus, son of Maximus, whom we prefer above our safety. After this, if you continue to deceive yourself, none can blame me for it!”

  Sextus smiled and waved a hand to him. It was no new revelation. He understood the attitude of all his friends far better than he did his own strange impulses that took possession of him as a rule when circumstances least provided an excuse.

  “My theory of loyalty to friendship,” he remarked, “is that a man should dare to do what he perceives is right, and thus should prove himself entitled to respect.”

  “And your friends are, in consequence, to enjoy the privilege of attending your crucifixion one of these days!” said Norbanus.

  “Nonsense. Only slaves and highwaymen are crucified.”

  “They call any one a highwayman who is a fugitive from what our ‘Roman Hercules’ calls justice,” Norbanus answered with a gesture of irritation. His own trick of finishing people’s sentences did not annoy Sextus nearly as much as Sextus’s trick of pounding on inaccuracies irritated him. He pressed his horse into a canter and for a while they rode beside the stream called the “Donkey-drowner” without further conversation, each man striving to subdue the ill-temper that was on the verge of outbreak.

  Romans of the old school valued inner calm as highly as they did the outer semblances of dignity; even the more modern Romans imitated that distinctive attitude, pretending to Augustan calmness that had actually ceased to be a part of public life. But with Sextus and Norbanus the inner struggle to be self-controlled was genuine; they bridled irritation in the same way that they forced their horses to obey them — captains of their own souls, as it were, and scornful of changefulness.

  Sextus, being the only son of a great landowner, and raised in the traditions of a secluded valley fifty leagues away from Rome, was almost half a priest by privilege of ancestry. He had been educated in the local priestly college, had himself performed the daily sacrifices that tradition imposed on the heads of families and, in his father’s frequent absence, had attended to all the details and responsibilities of managing a large estate. The gods of wood and stream and dale were very real to him. The daily offering, from each meal, to the manes of his ancestors, whose images in wax and wood and marble were preserved in the little chapel attached to the old brick homestead, had inspired in him a feeling that the past was forever present and a man’s thoughts were as important as his deeds.

  Norbanus, on the other hand, a younger son of a man less amply dowered with wealth and traditional authority, had other reasons for adopting, rather than inheriting, an attitude toward life not dissimilar from that of Sextus. Gods of wood and stream to him meant very little, and he had not family estates to hold him to the ancient views. To him the future was more real than the past, which he regarded as a state of ignorance from which the world was tediously struggling. But inherently he loved life’s decencies, although he mocked their sentimental imitations; and he followed Sextus — squandered hours with him, neglecting his own interests (which after all were nothing too important and were well enough looked after by a Syracusan slave), simply because Sextus was a manly sort of fellow whose friendship stirred in him emotions that he felt were satisfying. He was a born follower. His ugly face and rather mirth-provoking blue eyes, the loose, beautifully balanced seat on horseback and the cavalry-like carriage of his shoulders, served their notice to the world at large that he would stick to friends of his own choosing and for purely personal reasons, in spite of, and in the teeth of anything.

  “As I said,” remarked Sextus, “if Pertinax comes—”

  “He will show us how foolish a soldier can be in the arms of a woman,”

  Norbanus remarked, laughing again, glad the long silence was broken.

  “Orcus (the messenger of Dis, who carried dead souls to the underworld. The masked slaves who dragged dead gladiators out of the arena were disguised to represent Orcus) take his women! What I was going to say was, we shall learn from him the real news from Rome.”

  “All the names of the popular dancers!”

  “And if Galen is there we shall learn—”

  “About Commodus’ health. That is more to the point. Now if we could get into Galen’s chest of medicines and substitute—”

  “Galen is an honest doctor,” Sextus interrupted. “If Galen is there we will find out what the philosophers are discussing in Rome when spies aren’t listening. Pertinax dresses himself like a strutting peacock and pretends that women and money are his only interests, but what the wise ones said yesterday, Pertinax does today; and what they say today, he will do tomorrow. He can look more like a popinjay and act more like a man than any one in Rome.”

  “Who cares how they behave in Rome? The city has gone mad,” Norbanus answered. “Nowadays the best a man can do is to preserve his own goods and his own health. Ride to a conference do we? Well, nothing but words will come of it, and words are dangerous. I like my danger tangible and in the open where it can be faced. Three times last week I was approached by Glyco — you remember him
? — that son of Cocles and the Jewess — asking me to join a secret mystery of which he claims to be the unextinguishable lamp. But there are too many mysteries and not enough plain dealing. The only mystery about Glyco is how he avoids indictment for conspiracy — what with his long nose and sly eyes, and his way of hinting that he knows enough to turn the world upside down. If Pertinax talks mystery I will class him with the other foxes who slink into holes when the agenda look like becoming acta. Show me only a raised standard in an open field and I will take my chance beside it. But I sicken of all this talk of what we might do if only somebody had the courage to stick a dagger into Commodus.”

  “The men who could persuade themselves to do that, are persuaded that a worse brute might succeed him,” Sextus answered. “It is no use killing a Commodus to find a Nero in his shoes. If the successor were in sight — and visibly a man not a monster — there are plenty of men brave enough to give the dagger-thrust. But the praetorian guard, that makes and unmakes emperors, has been tasting the sweets of tyranny ever since Marcus Aurelius died. They despise their ‘Roman Hercules’ (Commodus’ favorite name for himself) — who doesn’t? But they grow fat and enjoy themselves under his tyranny, so they would never consent to leaving him unguarded, as happened to Nero, for instance, or to replacing him with any one of the caliber of Aurelius, if such a man could be found.”

  “Well, then, what do we go to talk about?” Norbanus asked.

  “We go for information.”

  “Dea dia! (the most mysterious of all the Roman deities) We inform ourselves that Rome has been renamed ‘The City of Commodus’ — that offices are bought and sold — that there were forty consuls in a year, each of whom paid for the office in turn — that no man’s life is safe — that it is wiser to take a cold in the head to Galen than to kiss a mule’s nose (it was a common superstition that a cold in the head could be cured by kissing a mule’s nose) — and then what? I begin to think that Pertinax is wiser to amuse himself with women after all!”

  Sextus edged his horse a little closer to the skewbald and for more than a minute appeared to be studying Norbanus’ face, the other grinning at him and making the stallion prance.

  “Are you never serious?” asked Sextus.

  “Always and forever, melancholy friend of mine! I seriously dread the consequences of that letter that you wrote to Rome! Unlike you, I have not much more than life to lose, but I value it all the more for being less encumbered. Like Apollonius, I pray for few possessions and no needs! But what I have, I treasure; I propose to live long and make use of life!”

  “And I!” retorted Sextus.

  With a gesture of disgust, he turned to stare behind him at the crowd on its way to Daphne, making such a business of pleasure as reduced the pleasure to a toil of Sisyphus (who had to roll a heavy stone perpetually up a steep hill in the underworld. Before he reached the top the stone always rolled down again).

  “I have more than gold,” said Sextus, “which it seems to me that any crooked-minded fool may have. I have a spirit in me and a taste for philosophies; I have a feeling that a man’s life is a gift entrusted to him by the gods — for use — to be preserved—”

  “By writing foolish letters, doubtless!” said Norbanus. “Come along, let us gallop. I am weary of the backs of all these roisterers.”

  And so they rode to Daphne full pelt, greatly to the anger of the too well dressed Antiochenes, who cursed them for the mud they splashed from wayside pools and for the dung and dust they kicked up into plucked and penciled faces.

  II. A CONFERENCE AT DAPHNE

  It was not yet dusk. The sun shone on the bronze roof of the temple of Apollo, making such a contrast to, and harmony with, marble and the green of giant cypresses as only music can suggest. The dying breeze stirred hardly a ripple on the winding ponds, so marble columns, trees and statuary were reflected amid shadows of the swans in water tinted by the colors of the sinking sun. There was a murmur of wind in the tops of the trees and a stirring of linen-clad girls near the temple entrance — voices droning from the near-by booths behind the shrubbery — one flute, like the plaint of Orpheus summoning Eurydice — a blossom- scented air and an enfolding mystery of silence.

  Pertinax, the governor of Rome, had merely hinted at Olympian desire, whereat some rich Antiochenes, long privileged, had been ejected with scant ceremony from a small marble pavilion on an islet, formed by a branch of the River Ladon that had been guided twenty years ago by Hadrian’s engineers in curves of exquisitely studied beauty. From between Corinthian columns was a view of nearly all the temple precincts and of the lawns where revelers would presently forget restraint. The first night of the Daphne season usually was the wildest night of all the year, but they began demurely, and for the present there was the restraint of expectation.

  Because there was yet snow on mountain-tops and the balmy air would carry a suggestion of a chill at sunset, there were cunningly wrought charcoal braziers set near the gilded couches, grouped around a semicircular low table so as to give each guest an unobstructed view from the pavilion. Pertinax — neither guest nor host, but a god, as it were, who had arrived and permitted the city of Antioch to ennoble itself by paying his expenses — stretched his long length on the middle couch, with Galen the physician on his right hand, Sextus on his left. Beyond Galen lay Tarquinius Divius and Sulpicius Glabrio, friends of Pertinax; and on Sextus’ left was Norbanus, and beyond him Marcus Fabius a young tribune on Pertinax’ staff. There was only one couch unoccupied.

  Galen was an older man than Pertinax, who was already graying at the temples. Galen had the wrinkled, smiling, shrewd face of an old philosopher who understood the trick of making himself socially prominent in order to pursue his calling unimpeded by the bitter jealousies of rivals. He understood all about charlatanry, mocked it in all its disguises and knew how to defeat it with sarcastic wit. He wore none of the distinguishing insignia that practising physicians usually favored; the studied plainness of his attire was a notable contrast to the costly magnificence of Pertinax, whose double-purple-bordered and fringed toga, beautifully woven linen and jeweled ornaments seemed chosen to combine suggestions of the many public offices he had succeeded to.

  He was a tall, lean, handsome veteran with naturally curly fair hair and a beard that, had it been dark, would have made him look like an Assyrian. There was a world of humor in his eyes, and an expression on his weathered face of wonder at the ways of men — an almost comical confession of his own inferiority of birth, combined with matter-of-fact ability to do whatever called for strength, endurance and mere ordinary common sense.

  “You are almost ashamed of your own good fortune,” Galen told him. “You wear all that jewelry, and swagger like the youngest tribune, to conceal your diffidence. Being honest, you are naturally frugal; but you are ashamed of your own honesty, so you imitate the court’s extravagance and made up for it with little meannesses that comfort your sense of extremes. The truth is, Pertinax, you are a man with a boy’s enthusiasms, a boy with a man’s experience.”

  “You ought to know,” said Pertinax. “You tutored Commodus. Whoever could take a murderer at the age of twelve and keep him from breaking the heart of a Marcus Aurelius knows more about men and boys than I do.”

  “Ah, but I failed,” said Galen. “The young Commodus was like a nibbling fish; you thought you had him, but he always took the bait and left the hook. The wisdom I fed to him fattened his wickedness. If I had known then what I have learned from teaching Commodus and others, not even Marcus Aurelius could have persuaded me to undertake the task — medical problem though it was, and promotion though it was, and answer though it was to all the doctors who denounced me as a charlatan. I bought my fashionable practise at the cost of knowing it was I who taught young Commodus the technique of wickedness by revealing to him all its sinuosities and how, and why, it floods a man’s mind.”

  “He was a beast in any case,” said Pertinax.

  “Yes, but a baffled, blind beast.
I removed the bandage from his eyes.”

  “He would have pulled it off himself.”

  “I did it. I turned a mere golden-haired savage into a criminal who knows what he is doing.”

  “Well, drink and forget it!” said Pertinax. “I, too, have done things that are best forgotten. We attain success by learning from defeat, and we forget defeat in triumph. I know of no triumph that did not blot out scores of worse things than defeat. When I was in Britain I subdued rebellion and restored the discipline of mutinying legions. How? I am not such a fool as to tell you all that happened! When I was in Africa men called me a great proconsul. So I was. They would welcome me back there, if all I hear about the present man is true. But do you suppose I did not fail in certain instances? They praise me for the aqueducts I built, and for the peace I left along the border. But I also left dry bones, and sons of dead men who will teach their grandsons how to hate the name of Rome! I sent a hundred thousand slaves from Africa. Sometimes, when I have dined unwisely and there is no Galen near to freshen up my belly juices, I have nightmares, in which men and women cry to me for water that I took from them to pour into the cities. I have learned this, Galen: Do one thing wisely and you will commit ten follies. You are lucky if you have but ten failures to detract from one success — as lucky as a man who has but ten mistresses to interfere with his enjoyment of his wife!”

  He spoke of mistresses because the girls were coming down the temple steps to take part in the sunset ceremony. The torches they carried were unlighted yet; their figures, draped in linen, looked almost super-humanly lovely in the deepening twilight, and as they laid their garlands on the marble altar near the temple steps and grouped themselves again on either side of it their movements suggested a phantasmagoria fading away into infinite distance, as if all the universe were filled with women without age or blemish. There began to be a scent of incense in the air.