Being only a barbarian and a slave, I didn't occupy what might have been called the choicest place in the imperial loge; and I was stretching and craning to get a glimpse of the approaching procession, when Tiberius noticed me.
"Move up, sonny," he said, "where you can see something."
I moved with alacrity. Agrippina cast a look of disgust down her long nose at Tiberius and drew the folds of her palla aside, lest it be contaminated by contact with a slave. From that moment until his death, I would gladly have died for Tiberius.
The head of the procession was now in view. It consisted of a cohort of the city watch, the organization of some seven or eight thousand soldiers which polices Rome. The duty of this cohort was to make certain that the streets were cleared for the orderly progress of the procession. Behind them came the trumpeters and horn blowers, two or three hundred strong; then followed the cavalry cohort of five hundred men, a gorgeous sight, with their plumed and burnished helmets, their leather corselets whose metal discs scintillated in the sunlight of a cloudless Roman day. Their long spears rose upright above them, a martial forest from which they never emerged, and over all, the Roman eagles which topped their ensigns. They made a brave show.
Behind them came the singers and dancers and pantomimists, depicting in song and dance the martial exploits of Germanicus, and then the chariots, hundreds upon hundreds of them, jeweled and painted and drawn by horses gorgeously caparisoned. After these marched several cohorts of the Praetorian Guard, and then came the most fabulous chariot of all. Long before you saw it, you knew that something of great meaning and magnificence was approaching by the great cheers of the multitude that welled to a crest and moved with it like a tidal wave which always threatened to break but never did.
It was Germanicus.
We were all very excited as we saw him coming, and nudged one another and said, "Oh, look! Here comes Germanicus," just as though everyone else in the loge were blind and did not see him, too. I forgot, in my enthusiasm and excitement, that I was only a barbarian and a slave: I nudged Tiberius. I had no more than done it when I realized what I had done, and once again I saw the crucified slaves along the Via Flaminia. Even a senator does not poke an emperor of Rome with impunity. Tiberius looked down at me and smiled; then he patted my head. I once more dedicated my life to the business of dying for Tiberius, and it has been my one regret since that I never had the opportunity.
The chariot of Germanicus stopped before the loge of the Emperor, and Germanicus descended and knelt before Tiberius, speaking a few words of loyalty and affection, to which the Emperor replied with a little speech of praise and promise; then Germanicus returned to his chariot and moved on.
It was not until then that I saw what followed in chains on foot behind his chariot: my father and my mother. Tears welled to my eyes-tears of sorrow and of pride. You should have seen them, my son. If you had, you would be as proud as I that the blood of Britons flows in your veins. Their chins were up, their bearing that of conquerors rather than the conquered. They looked neither to the right nor to the left. It was as though they walked among human scum that they would not lower themselves to look upon. They did not even deign to glance at an emperor of Rome. The great mustachios of my father bristled belligerently. And so they passed on. I never saw them again, and it was long before I knew what became of them-after I became better acquainted with the ways of the Romans.
Behind them came a long procession of unkempt, hairy creatures who wore their chains with gutteral grumbling and with no nobility of bearing. Their hair, redstained, added nothing to their appearance, nor did their continual scratching. These were the Germans.
Following these were a whole legion of veterans who had served under Germanicusone of the legions that his stupidity had not lost-the proud Roman cohorts that had captured a couple of mud villages, mutinied, sought to overthrow the Emperor, and demanded largess from the public treasury. Well, they were Romans, and I suppose Romans will always be Romans until the end of time; that is if both they and the supply of poison and daggers hold out.
But I had lost interest in the triumph of Germanicus since I had seen my father and my mother, and it was not even restored when we went on to the amphitheater of Statilius Taurus to witness the games. There were athletic contests, gladiatorial combats, and encounters between men and wild beasts. It concluded for that day with the loosing of some hundred half-starved lions and tigers upon an equal number of unarmed criminals. The Roman people were in their glory.
I was glad when we got home, and gladder still when I could stretch out in the dark on my thin mattress upon the hard, marble floor at the foot of the bed where lay my semidivine master, Caius Caesar Caligula.
Chapter IV
A.U.C.770 [A.D. 17]
LITTLE BOOTS was now five years old and his education began in earnest. Tutors were assigned him and regular hours of study designated. I saw in all this some relaxation from the constant attendance upon my little master that had so irked me. During his study hours I should be free, and I looked forward to passing as much time as possible with Tibur, whose tall tales never ceased to intrigue me. Also, I wished to wander about Rome and see the sights, but I had reckoned without Little Boots. He would have no studies unless I were present.
I could, with pleasure, have wrung his Julian neck; but now that I am older I cannot but thank his supreme selfishness which once again redounded to my great advantage, though that, of course, was not his intention. He never, voluntarily and unselfishly, did me nor any other a kindly service.
With glum mien, I sat through the interminable hours of his lessons; but I couldn't shut my ears, and I commenced to learn. Finally, I took an interest, and when I did, the tutors, who were kindly men, took an interest in me. As I was older than Little Boots, I grasped things more quickly and soon forged far ahead of him. I learned to read and write not only Latin but, in the years that followed, Greek as well.
I think that the highlight of my life was when I had learned the language of the Romans sufficiently well that I could transfer my thoughts to the wax of my tablets and read the poems of Homer and the writings of Titus Livius and the works of Marcus Tullius Cicero. A new world was opened to me--a magic world of wonder.
But life was not all study. There were other things to engage our attention. One of these occurred a few days after the triumph of Germanicus: Little Boots pushed Agrippina Minor into the pool in the peristyle. Agrippina Minor was two years old and had not yet learned to swim.
I was horrified, but Little Boots laughed uproariously. "Don't touch her!" he yelled at me as I ran forward to rescue the obnoxious creature who was always bawling. "I, Caius Caesar, command. I have never seen anyone drown."
"Go chase yourself," I advised him, as I fished the foul brat out from among the lily pads. Then I heard something that sounded much like the war whoop of the German hordes, and looking up saw Agrippina Major legging it along the balcony toward the stairway.
Knowing that in one way or another I should be blamed for this, and ignoring for the nonce the fact that I was the great-grandson of Cingetorix, I beat a hasty retreat; and when I say hasty, I mean hasty. I was out in the street and legging it for elsewhere in what probably would have set an all-time Olympian record.
In moments of great stress or danger, it is only natural for a child to seek the protection of a friend, and I had only one friend in Rome: Tibur. As Romulus and Remus found a protector in the shewolf, I would find one, a far more ferocious one, in the person of the ex-gladiator. He would tell me for the fortieth time that old, old story of which I never tired: the bloody story of the murder he had committed. He would tell me of how he twisted the heads from lions for the edification of the Roman populace and a Roman emperor. He would probably search around in the gory depths of his memory and disinter other horrendous exploits. But, more important still, he would take me to that woman in the city who would hide me until things quieted down or I could make my escape and start back for Britannia. I had
no doubt but that, once out of the city, I could travel half the length of Italy, cross the Alps, traverse the country of the Helvetians and that of the Belgians, and cross the channel to my native land. Would that I still retained that sublime self-confidence!
However, as I turned my footsteps toward the Praetorian Camp, a bug crawled into the olive oil. It became clear to me that the first place they would look for me would be the Praetorian Camp, because that was where they had found me upon that other occasion. Had I not been the great-grandson of Cingetorix, I should have been stricken with terror; and, as it is my aim to be scrupulously veracious, I shall have to admit that I only escaped it by the slim margin of one "great." Had I been just one more generation removed from Cingetorix, I might have permitted myself the satisfaction of being wholly terror-stricken without reflecting too much dishonor upon his great name.
I now reversed my route of retreat and headed for the district of towering, grimy tenements and narrow alleys, confident that no one would look for me there.
A mass of dirty, ragged children played on the even dirtier pavement of the alley where I sought refuge. As I approached them, they began to hoot and jeer, directing their opprobrious sallies at my clean tunic and new sandals; then they began to shy things at me-bits of stone and handfuls of filth. Not to be outdone in the social amenities of the Eternal City, I shied stones and handfuls of filth back at them, scoring, I noted with considerable pride, more often than they did.
Presently a boy much larger than most of the others, a boy about my own age, or perhaps a little older, detached himself from the enemy front and made a sally. He ran up quite close to me and spit on me. Now, even when I had been spit upon by a Caesar, I had not taken it lying down, nor was I of any mind to take it lying down from this scum of a pleb. I hauled off and socked him one on the nose, from which blood instantly spurted in all directions. But the lad was game. He landed a good one on my right eye; then we went into a clinch and rolled upon the pavement.
First he was on top and then I was on top, and all the time we were lambasting each other as hard as we could. He was trying to bite my nose off, and I was bending every effort of a long line of Cingetorixes to gouge his eyes out.
Surrounding us was a howling mob of enemy first-line troops, support, and reserves; and they were all kicking me in the ribs whenever they found an opening, and when there was no opening they kicked my opponent in the ribs. Finally, during a breathing spell, the creature who was now underneath me found tongue. "Vile slave," he managed to gasp, "how dare you lay hands on a Roman freeman!"
"Thus," I replied, and conked him again-a peach, right on his mouth.
Hostilities were immediately renewed. How long it would have gone on I do not know had not someone seized us each by the scruff of the neck and jerked us to our feet. It was a soldier of the city guard, a behemoth about the size of the Arch of Augustus. The army of the enemy now vanished.
"What do you two brats think you are doing?" deman ded the Arch of Augustus.
"He struck me," explained my late opponent.
"So what?" demanded the Arch.
"I am a freeman, a citizen of Rome." This was laying it on a little thick for he was not a man and he couldn't become a citizen of Rome until he came of age.
"So what?" redemanded the Arch, who seemed to be a man of few words.
"He is a slave," said the filthy little pleb haughtily.
The Arch now took a closer look at me. "So he is," he said, having pierced the blood and filth upon my tunic to see that it was the tunic of a slave. "So he is." The fellow was tiresomely repetitious.
Suddenly he commenced to shake me until I thought all my teeth would fly out of my mouth. "What do you mean by striking a Roman?" he demanded.
"He spit on me," I explained.
"Well, why shouldn't he spit on you, slave?"
"I have just shown him why he shouldn't," I explained.
"Well, come along with me and tell that to the judge when your case comes up-if it ever does."
The Arch dragged me along the streets of Rome, sometimes by an arm, sometimes by an ear. He seemed to prefer the ear because it hurt me more. He dragged me past the frowning Tullianum, built by Servius Tullius more than five hundred years ago-and it looked it. Here Spartacus had been incarcerated; Jugurtha, the Numidian king; the conspirators of Catiline; the Vercingetorix. But at the moment I was not interested in points of historical interest.
He did not take me into the Tullianum, but to another prison nearby. The Tullianum was not reserved for little boy slaves, but for more important malefactors who were awaiting execution. Perhaps, if I lived, I should someday rate the Tullianum; and the way I felt toward Rome and Romans at that moment, and especially the things that I should have liked to have done to certain members of the imperial family, and to a big gorilla of the city watch, would undoubtedly have landed me there could I have carried my dreams to realization.
At the prison to which I was taken I was pushed into a dark, foul-smelling dungeon that was already overcrowded. It was filled with the dregs of Rome, below which no other dregs have ever sunk. They were the abysmal, bottom-most precipitation of the alchemy of crime and squalor and sordidness and vice and degeneracy. There were both men and women there, and the women were the worse. I was the only child. They were slave, freedman, and freeman. There were no sanitary facilities; there was no water for bathing or for drinking. The miasma of ordure, sweat, and disease was so overpowering that I thought I should be suffocated by it. I closed my eyes and sought to recall the beloved, heather-covered moors of Britannia on a spring morning and the familiar scents of her great oak forests; but nothing could pierce the putrid stink of that foul dungeon and its fouler inmates.
Besotted, hopeless, inarticulate lumps of hideous flesh, they looked at me from dull, bleared eyes as I was thrust into their midst. I imagine that their brains were poisoned by the noxious vapors they constantly inhaled, only to exhale them still more contaminated.
They talked: profanely, obscenely. There was mirthless laughter. It might have come from the lower regions where the dead are. One, a great brute of a man with matted hair and beard, spoke to me. "What brings you here, my chick?" he demanded. "Did you, by chance, lead the gladiators in an uprising against the Emperor? Your black eye, your bloody nose, your scratched face, the blood and filth upon your tunic could have been achieved in no less ambitious an adventure."
Those around him laughed, and another man approached me. "I like your looks, little one," he said. "You and I shall be great friends." He was a loathsome fellow, halfdecayed from some horrid disease.
The brute who had first spoken to me stepped between us. "Lay off the young 'un," he growled. "He belongs to me."
The other bared his teeth like a beast snarling over his kill. "Try and take him," he challenged.
The brute struck a terrific blow that sent the man reeling. He stumbled over the bodies of men and women too insensate from long starvation even to protest. He fell, but he was soon up. He charged the brute, with blood running from his nose and the corners of his mouth. He made strange sounds; they were not animal sounds, nor were they human. He leaped upon the brute; and the two fell to the stone floor, biting, kicking, scratching, gouging.
I backed into a corner, horror-stricken. I had seen men battle before and I had seen men die, but they had been brave men fighting in the open-warriors of Britannia, soldiers of Rome. They fought like men, not like unclean beasts. I wondered why they fought so because of me. I was young then. I did not know, but I had a presentiment that something terrible might happen to me no matter which one was victorious.
At last the brute arose. The other lay very quiet: He did not speak nor move; he would never speak nor move again. He was dead. A woman laughed. "Served him right," she said, "but 'twere a pity that you did not die, too." The brute glowered at her. A guard came, tardily. "What's going on in here?" he demanded. No one replied. He looked about and saw the man lying in a pool of blood. He kicked him:
then he rolled him over on his back and saw that he was dead. "Who did this?" he asked. No one replied. The guard looked at the brute and saw blood on his face and his beard and his hands. "So it is you again?" he barked. "Come along with me," and he gave the brute a push toward the doorway. "We have ways of curing the likes of you of bad habits." They went out, and the guard closed and locked the door again. "It is a good thing for you, lad," said the woman who had laughed, "that those two are out of the way. There are others here almost as bad; but they will be good for a while after this. If anyone bothers you, yell for the guard-he may come and he may not. And if he does come; he may beat you. But these others will leave you alone."
"Shut up, you filth," growled a man. "The kid is only a slave; those two were citizens of Rome--and so am I," he added.
"What did you do to get in here?" the woman asked me.
"A boy spit on me, and we fought in the street," I replied. "He was the son of a citizen; I am but a slave."
"You may die for that," said a man, "or they may send you to the mines for life."
"Would they crucify me?" I asked.
"Very probably: that is the death for slaves. It is very painful. Sometimes they live for days, screaming until their tongues swell so from thirst that they can no longer scream."
Had I a razor or a dull knife, or even a piece of glass, I should have opened my veins then and there. I did not fear to die. From earliest childhood we Britons are taught not to fear death. But crucifixion! To have spikes driven through my hands and feet, and to hang thus on a cross for days! For a moment, I was weak and sick, and then I remembered that I was the great-grandson of Cingetorix. From that moment I started schooling myself in a determination not to cry out even once, no matter how much it hurt. The shade of Cingetorix would look down upon me and be proud.
My sad thoughts were presently interrupted by the sound of dull blows, followed by screams. "He is getting what-for," said the woman, laughing. The sound of the blows continued; the sound of the screams increased. The woman counted out loud. She was counting the blows. After fifty, the screams diminished in volume; after a hundred, they ceased. "He couldn't take it," said the woman.
Burroughs, Edgar Rice - I Am A Barbarian Page 4
