Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “If he isn’t killed soon, Severus or one of the others will forestall us all,” said Sextus. “Pertinax has only one chance: to be on the throne before the other candidates know what is happening.”

  Narcissus’ bronze face lighted with a sudden smile that rippled all around the corners of his mouth, so that he looked like a genial satyr.

  “Speaking of killing,” he said, “Marcia has ordered me to kill you the moment you make up your mind the time has come to strike!”

  “You promised her, of course?”

  “No, as it happens we were interrupted. But she relies on me and if she ever begins to suspect me I would rather die in the arena than be racked and burned!”

  “Why not then? How is this for a proposal?” Sextus touched him on the shoulder. “Substitute yourself and me for two of these men! Send me in against him first. If he kills me, you next. One of us might get him. I am lucky. I believe the gods are interested in me, I have had so many escapes from death.”

  “I haven’t much faith in the gods,” said Narcissus. “They may be all like Commodus. I heard Galen say that men created gods in their own image.”

  Sextus smiled at him.

  “You have been listening, I suppose, to Marcia and her Christians.”

  “Listening, yes, but I don’t lean either way. It doesn’t seem to me that Christianity can do much for a man when javelins are in the air. And besides, to be frank with you, Sextus, I rather hope to make a little something for myself. God though he is said to be, I would like to see Commodus killed for I loathe him. But I hope to survive him and obtain my freedom. Pertinax would manumit me. That is why I applied for the post of trainer in this beastly ergastulum. It is bad enough to have to endure the gloom of men virtually condemned to death and looking for a chance to kill themselves, but it is better than treading the sand to have one’s liver split, one’s throat cut, and be dragged out with the hooks. I have fought many a fight, but I liked each one less than the last.”

  He got up and strode again along the corridor, glancing into the cells, where gladiators sat fettered to the wall.

  “This whole business is getting too confused for me,” he grumbled, sitting down again. “You want to kill Commodus, as is reasonable. Marcia has ordered me to kill you, which is unreasonable! Yet for the present she protects you. Why? She knows you are Commodus’ enemy. She seems anxious to save Commodus. Yet she encourages Pertinax, who doesn’t want to be emperor; he only dallies with the thought because Marcia helps Cornificia to persuade him! Isn’t that a confusion for you? And now there’s Bultius Livius. As I understand it, Marcia caught him spying on her. No woman in her senses would trust Livius; the man has snowbroth in his veins and slow fire in his head. Yet Marcia now heaps favors on him!”

  “That is my doing,” said Sextus.

  “Are you mad then, too?”

  “Maybe! I have persuaded Marcia that, now she has possession of the journal Livius was keeping, she can henceforth hold that over him and use him to advantage. She can win his gratitude—”

  “He has none!”

  “ — and at the same time hold over him the threat of exposure for connection with the Severus faction, and the Pescennius faction, and the Clodius Albinus faction. He had it all down in his journal. He can easily be involved in those conspiracies if Marcia isn’t satisfied with his spying in her behalf.”

  “Gemini! The man will break down under the strain. He has no stamina.

  He will denounce us all.”

  “Let us hope so,” Sextus answered. “I am counting on it. Nothing but sudden danger will ever bring Pertinax up to the mark! I gave a bond to Marcia for Livius’ life.”

  “Jupiter! What kind of bond? And what has come over Marcia that she accepted it?”

  “I guaranteed to her that I will not denounce herself to Commodus! She saw the point. She could never clear herself.”

  “But how could you denounce her? She can have you seized and silenced any time! Weren’t you in Cornificia’s house, with the guard at the gate? Why didn’t she summon the praetorians and hand you over to them?”

  “Because Galen was there, too. She loves him, trusts him, and Galen is my friend. Besides, Pertinax would turn on her if she should have me killed. Pertinax was my father’s friend, and is mine. Marcia’s only chance, if Commodus should lose his life, is for Pertinax to seize the throne and continue to be her friend and protect her. Any other possible successor to Commodus would have her head off in the same hour.”

  “Well, Sextus, that argument won’t keep her from having you murdered. I am only hoping she won’t order me to do it, because the cat will be out of the bag then. I will not refuse, but I will certainly not kill you, and that will mean—”

  “You forget Norbanus and my freedmen,” Sextus interrupted. “She knows very well that they know all my secrets. They would avenge me instantly by sending Commodus full information of the plot, involving Marcia head over heels. She is ready to betray Commodus if that should seem the safest course. If she is capable of treachery to him, she is equally sure to betray all her friends if she thought her own life were in danger!”

  “Now listen, Sextus, and don’t speak too loud or they’ll hear you in the cells; any of these poor devils would jump at a chance to save his own skin by betraying you and me. Talk softly. I say, listen! There isn’t any safety anywhere with all these factions plotting each against the other, none knowing which will strike first and Commodus likely to pounce on all of them at any minute. I don’t know why he hasn’t heard of it already.”

  “He is too busy training his body to have time to use his brain,” said

  Sextus. “However, go on.”

  “I think Commodus is quite likely to have the best of it!” Narcissus said, screwing up his eyes as if he gazed at an antagonist across the dazzling sand of the arena. “Somebody — some spy — is sure to inform him. There will be wholesale proscriptions. Commodus will try to scare Severus, Niger and Albinus by slaughtering their supporters here in Rome. I can see what is coming.”

  “Are you, too, a god — like Commodus — that you can see so shrewdly?”

  “Never mind. I can see. And I can see a better way for you, and for me also. You have made yourself a great name as Maternus, less, possibly, in Rome than on the countryside. You have more to begin with than ever Spartacus had—”

  “Aye, and less, too,” Sextus interrupted. “For I lack his confidence that Rome can be brought to her knees by an army of slaves. I lack his willingness to try to do it. Rome must be saved by honorable Romans, who have Rome at heart and not their own personal ambition. No army of runaway slaves can ever do it. Nothing offends me more than that Commodus makes slaves his ministers, and I mean by that no offense to you, Narcissus, who are fit to rank with Spartacus himself. But I am a republican. It is not vengeance that I seek. I will reckon I have lived if I have ridded Rome of Commodus and helped to replace him with a man who will restore our ancient liberties.”

  “Liberties?” Narcissus wore his satyr-smile again. “It makes small difference to slaves and gladiators how much liberty the free men have! The more for them, the less for us! Let us live while the living is good, Sextus! Let us take to the mountains and help ourselves to what we need while Pertinax and all these others fight for too much! Let them have their too much and grow sick of it! What do you and I need beyond clothing, a weapon, armor, a girl or two and a safe place for retreat? I have heard Sardinia is wonderful. But if you still think you would rather haunt your old estates, where you know the people and they know you, so that you will be warned of any attempt to catch you, that will be all right with me. We can swoop down on the inns along the main roads now and then, rob whom it is convenient to rob, and live like noblemen!”

  “Three years I have lived an outlaw’s life,” Sextus answered, “sneaking into Rome to borrow money from my father’s friends to save me the necessity of stealing. It is one thing to pretend to be a robber, and another thing to rob. The robber’s name
makes nine men out of ten your secret well-wishers; the deed makes you all men’s enemy. How do you suppose I have escaped capture? It was simple enough. Every robber in Italy has called himself Maternus, so that I have seemed to be here, there, everywhere, aye, and often in three or four places at once! I have been caught and killed at least a dozen times! But all the while my men and I were safe because we took care to harm nobody. We let others do the murdering and robbing. We have lived like hermits, showing ourselves only often enough to keep alive the Maternus legend.”

  “Well, isn’t that better than risking your neck trying to make and unmake emperors?” Narcissus asked.

  “I risk my neck each hour I linger in Rome!”

  “Well then, by Hercules, take payment for the risk, and cut the risk and vanish!” exclaimed Narcissus. “Help yourself once and for all to a bag full of gold in exchange for your father’s estates that were confiscated when they cut his head off. Then leave Italy, and let us be outlaws in Sardinia.”

  Sextus laughed.

  “That probably sounds glorious to one in your position. I, too, rather enjoyed the prospect when I first made my escape from Antioch and discovered how easy the life was. But though I owe it to my father’s memory to win back his estates, even that, and present outlawry is small compared to the zeal I have for restoring Rome’s ancient liberties. But I don’t deceive myself; I am not the man who can accomplish that; I can only help the one who can, and will. That one is Pertinax. He will reverse the process that has been going on since Julius Caesar overthrew the old republic. He will use a Caesar’s power to destroy the edifice of Caesar and rebuild what Caesar wrecked!”

  Narcissus pondered that, his head between his hands.

  “I haven’t Rome at heart,” he said at last. “Why should I have? There are girls, whom I have forgotten, whom I loved more than I love Rome. I am a slave gladiator. I have been applauded by the crowds, but know what that means, having seen other men go the same route. I am an emperor’s favorite, and I know what that means too; I saw Cleander die; I have seen man after man, and woman after woman lose his favor suddenly. Banishment, death, the ergastulum, torture — and, what is much worse, the insults the brute heaps on any one he turns against — I am too wise to give that—” he spat on the flag-stones— “for the friendship of Commodus. And Commodus is Rome; you can’t persuade me he isn’t. Rome turns on its favorites as he does — scorns them, insults them, throws them on dung-heaps. That for Rome!” He spat again. “They even break the noses off the statues of the men they used to idolize! They even throw the statues on a dung-heap to insult the dead! Why should I set Rome above my own convenience?”

  “Well, for instance, you could almost certainly buy your freedom by betraying me,” said Sextus. “Why don’t you?”

  “Jupiter! How shall a man answer that? I suppose I don’t betray you because if I did I should loathe myself. And I prefer to like myself, which I contrive to do at intervals. Also, I enjoy the company of honest men, and I think you are honest, although I think you are also an idealist — which, I take it, is the same thing as a born fool, or so I have begun to think, since I attend on the emperor and have to hear so much talk of philosophy. Look you what philosophy has made of Commodus! Didn’t Marcus Aurelius beget him from his own loins, and wasn’t Marcus Aurelius the greatest of all philosophers? Didn’t he surround young Commodus with all the learned idealists he could find? That is what I am told he did. And look at Commodus! Our Roman Commodus! God Commodus! I haven’t murdered him because I am afraid, and because I don’t see how I could gain by it. I don’t betray you because I would despise myself if I did.”

  “I would despise myself if I should be untrue to Rome,” Sextus answered after a moment. “Commodus is not Rome. Neither is the mob Rome.”

  “What is then?” Narcissus asked. “The bricks and mortar? The marble that the slaves must haul under the lash? The ponds where they feed their lampreys on dead gladiators? The arena where a man salutes a dummy emperor before a disguised one kills him? The senate, where they buy and sell the consulates and praetorships and guaestorships? The tribunals where justice goes by privilege? The temples where as many gods as there are, Romans yell for sacrifices to enrich the priests? The farms where the slave-gangs labor like poor old Sysyphus and are sold off in their old age to the contractors who clear the latrines, or to the galleys, or, if they’re lucky, to the lime-kilns where they dry up like sticks and die soon? There is a woman in a side-street near the fish-market, who is very rich and looks like Rome to me. She has so many gold rings on her fingers that you can’t see the dirt underneath; and she owns so many brothels and wine-shops that she can even buy off the tax-collectors. Do I love her? Do I love Rome? No! I love you, Sextus, son of Maximus, and I will go with you to the world’s end if you will lead the way.”

  “I love Rome,” Sextus answered. “Possibly I want to see her liberties restored because I love my own liberty and can’t imagine myself honorable unless Rome herself is honored first. When you and I are sick we need a Galen. Rome needs Pertinax. You ask me what is Rome? She is the cradle of my manhood.”

  “A befouled nest!” said Narcissus.

  “An Augean stable with a Hercules who doesn’t do his work, I grant you!

  But we can substitute another Hercules.”

  “Pertinax is too old,” Narcissus objected, weakening, a trifle sulkily.

  “He is old enough to wish to die in honor rather than dishonor. You and I, Narcissus, have no honor — you a slave and I an outlaw. Let us win, then, honor for ourselves by helping to heal Rome of her dishonor!”

  “Oh well, have it your own way,” said Narcissus, unconvinced. “A brass as for your honor! The alternative is death or liberty in either case, and as for me, I prefer friendship to religion, so I will follow you, whichever road you take. Now go. These fellows mustn’t recognize you. It is time to take them one by one into the exercising yard. I daren’t take more than one at a time or they’d kill me even with the blunted practise-weapons. I wish they might face Commodus as boldly as they tackle me! I am a weary man, and many times a bruised one, I can tell you, when the night comes, after putting twenty of them through their paces.”

  IX. STEWED EELS

  The training arena where Commodus worked off energy and kept his Herculean muscles in condition was within the palace grounds, but the tunnel by which he reached it continued on and downward to the Circus Maximus, so that he could attend the public spectacles without much danger of assassination.

  Nevertheless, a certain danger still existed. One of his worst frenzies of proscription had been started by a man who waited for him in the tunnel, and lost his nerve and then, instead of killing him, pretended to deliver an insulting message from the senate. Since that time the tunnel had been lined with guards at regular intervals, and when Commodus passed through his mysterious “double” was obliged to walk in front of him surrounded by enough attendants to make any one not in the secret believe the double was the emperor himself.

  No man in the known world was less incapable than Commodus of self- defense against an armed man. There was no deception about his feats of strength and skill; he was undoubtedly the most terrific fighter and consummate athlete Rome had ever seen, and he was as proud of it as Nero once was of his “golden voice.” But, as he explained to the fawning courtiers who shouldered one another for a place beside him as he hurried down the tunnel:

  “How could Rome replace me? Yesterday I had to order a slave beaten to death for breaking a vase of Greek glass. I can buy a hundred slaves for half what that glass cost Hadrian. And I could have a thousand better senators tomorrow than the fools who belch and stammer in the curia, the senate house. But where would you find another Commodus if some lurking miscreant should stab me from behind? It was the geese that saved the capitol. You cacklers can preserve your Commodus.”

  They agreed in chorus, it would be Rome’s irreparable loss if he should die, and certain senators, more fertile than the others
in expedients for drawing his attention to themselves, paused ostentatiously to hold a little conversation with the guards and promise them rewards if they should catch a miscreant lurking in wait to attack “our beloved, our glorious emperor.”

  Commodus overheard them, as they meant he should.

  “And such fulsome idiots as those expect me to believe they can frame laws!” He scowled over-shoulder. “Write down their names for me, somebody. The senate needs pruning! I will purge it the way Galen used to purge me when I had the colic! Cioscuri! But these leaky babblers suffocate me!”

  He was true to the Caesarian tradition. He believed himself a god. He more than half-persuaded other men. His almost superhuman energy and skill with weapons, his terrific storms of anger and his magnetism overawed courtiers and politicians as they did the gladiators whom he slew in the arena. The strain of madness in his blood provided cunning that could mask itself beneath a princely bluster of indifference to consequences. He could fear with an extravagance coequal to the fury of his love of danger, and his fear struck terror into men’s hearts, as it stirred his mad brain into frenzies.

  He made no false claim when he called Rome the City of Commodus and himself the Roman Hercules. The vast majority of Romans were unfit to challenge his contempt of them, and his contempt was never under cover for a moment.

  Debauchery, of wine and women, entered not at all into his private life although, in public, he encouraged it in others for the simple reason that it weakened men who otherwise might turn on him. He was never guilty of excesses that might undermine his strength or shake his nerves; there was an almost superhuman purity about his worship of athletic powers. He outdid the Greeks in that respect. But he allowed the legend of his monstrous orgies in the palace to gain currency, partly because that encouraged the Romans to debauch themselves and render themselves incapable of overthrowing him, and partly because it helped to cover up his trick of employing a substitute to occupy the royal pavilion at the games when he himself drove chariots in the races or fought in the arena as the gladiator Paulus.