by Tom Holt
Speaking as one who already knew how it feels to get roped up on a cross with the sergeant swinging the big wooden mallet I told you about earlier, I've got to admit I wasn't happy 'It's all your fault,' I told Lucius Domitius. 'You should have told me trying to tickle a breastplate was a bloody stupid idea.'
He looked at me, then shook his head and lay down on the floor.
'Really,' I said, 'I rely on you to do that. Yes, I know sometimes I get an idea and I'm all carried away with it, but that's where you come in, it's your job to say, don't be so bloody daft, Galen, that's a terrible idea. And you didn't. And that's how come we're in this mess.
'Go to hell,' he said.
'Yes, right,' I replied. 'Because of you, that's exactly what I'm about to do, thank you ever so much.' I'd been pacing up and down but there didn't seem any point, and besides, the cell was too small for serious pacing. 'Lucius Domitius,' I said, 'you ever think about that?'
'About what?'
'You know,' I said. 'What happens to us when we die. Well, what do you reckon?'
He yawned. 'Can't say I've given it much thought.'
That struck me as a bit poor. 'Oh really,' I said. 'That's funny, because I seem to remember that in the old days you were the supreme high priest and in charge of all the religion right across the empire. Seems to me you can't have been doing your job properly, in that case.'
'True.'
I wasn't having that. I really wanted to have an argument about something.
'Bloody hell,' I said, 'that's a fine thing to say If anybody ought to know about religion and stuff, it's you. Your uncle's a god, for pity's sake. Come to that, half your rotten family are gods.' I thought about that for a moment.
'Here,' I said, 'do you think that when we fetch up on the other side they'll put in a good word for us?'
'I doubt it,' he said. 'All my relatives always hated me. Even the ones I didn't have executed.' He sighed. 'My uncle's going to be convinced I murdered him; and even if he isn't, I don't think he'll be too happy about what I did to his wife. Who was also,' he added, 'his niece. So I don't think we can count on him being very sympathetic. Now, who does that leave? Well, there's my great-great-great-grandfather Augustus, he was very fond of my grandfather, so there may be a bit of hope there. On the other hand, he was always bloody strict, so I've heard. If he knows about me playing the lyre in public, he'll have me in Tartarus before you can say knife. That just leaves his uncle Julius, and he was a vicious bastard at the best of times.' He yawned again. 'If I were you, as soon as we get there, I'd pretend you aren't with me. It'll probably make things a lot easier for you.
'Thanks a lot,' I said; then I paused. 'So you really believe in all that, then?'
He laughed. 'No, of course not,' he said. 'My great-uncle Claudius can't be a god; he needed two footmen and a surgeon every time he had a shit. Besides which, I don't think I've ever really believed in the gods. It's all just politics, as far as I can see.
'Shut up, for crying out loud,' I shouted, and I spat into the fold of my tunic for luck. 'That's a bloody stupid thing to say at the best of times, and the way we're fixed right now .. .' Well, I couldn't believe it. Of all the things to say What if Jupiter had heard, or one of the others?
'Calm down.' He sighed. 'One thing's for sure, I'm going to find out the answer pretty soon, one way or another. So where's the point in speculating about it now?'
He was starting to get on my nerves. 'Could make all the difference in the world,' I said. 'Like, I heard about one lot who reckon that so long as you tell the gods you're sorry for all the bad stuff you did just before you die, you get to go straight to the Elysian Fields, just the same as if you'd been good all your life. If there's any truth in that, it could be important.'
He shook his head. 'I don't think so. That wouldn't make any sense. You could be an absolute shit for seventy years, like — well, like my great—great—great-uncle Tiberius, for example, and so long as you had a moment or so to apologise before you snuffed it, you'd be free and clear. It'd be chaos.'
Something had been striking me as odd, and I finally realised what it was.
'You're being very calm about all this. Usually when we're about to die you go all to pieces.'
'Yes,' he admitted. 'But this time it's — well, so final, if you see what I mean. All the pieces slotting into place, if you like. It's got to mean that this time we really have come to the end of the road. Somehow, that doesn't bother me nearly as much as when I still believe, somewhere deep down, that we might be getting out alive after all. There's a lot to be said for not panicking. I wish I'd known about it before.'
I shrugged. 'I'll say this for you, back in the old days you'd never have been this calm.'
'True,' he said. 'But in the old days I had something to live for.'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'Oh for pity's sake, Galen, look at me. Look at what I've turned into, ever since we ended up in Phaon's cellar. I'm a joke. I'm dressed in rags, I've got hands like the soles of a boot, I'm sunburnt up to the shoulder, I spend my life running away from soldiers and sleeping in ditches, and all I've got in the way of human companionship is you. Call that a life? Why the hell should I be bothered about losing something like that? If it was a punishment, I wouldn't do it to my worst enemy I breathed out slowly 'I'm going to pretend you didn't say any of that,' I said.
'I'm going to pretend that even if you did say it, you didn't mean it, you're just ranting away because deep inside, you're scared out of your mind and it's making you say the first thing that comes into your head. All right?'
'Suit yourself. I still reckon it's a pretty poor go when I've got to spend my last hours in this life locked up in a cell with you. When I think how it used to be...' He stopped and sighed. 'Actually,' he said, 'I'll tell you a secret. I hated having to be emperor.'
'Bullshit,' I said.
'No, absolutely straight. It was a foul life, and I loathed it.'
'Sure,' I said. 'All that partying and boozing and screwing around. You only did it because you had to.'
He laughed. 'That's not far off the mark, believe it or not. It seemed to be the thing to do. I'd spend all day in the law courts hearing appeals, or in some meeting with advisers — advisers, that's a joke, they were telling me what to do. That's when they bothered to let me know what they were up to. Oh, they were very polite, it was always, May I suggest, Caesar, and Perhaps you might consider doing this, Caesar, but if I came up with something I wanted to do, or I suggested a way of dealing with whatever it was, it was as though they hadn't heard me. And then there was the endless bitching and fighting, wherever my mother was concerned. I reckon she fed on melodrama, like a bee on honey And then, at the end of the day, in would come all my so-called friends — though I wouldn't trust them not to steal snot, they were an evil bunch — and then I'd be obliged to go out with them, getting drunk and beating people up in the street.
I think I only went along with it because it was the exact opposite of what I'd been doing all day only it wasn't. It was the other side of the same coin, another thing that was expected of me. And so finally I thought, what is it I really want to do, and I knew, I wanted to write poetry and music and perform in front of people. Can you believe it? All I wanted to do was stuff any tart's son can do but I wasn't allowed to. Well, I made up my mind, I wasn't having that — it was Callistus who helped me do that. He said, if there's something you want to do, then you go right ahead and do it, and to the crows with what anybody thinks. And I was just starting to get the hang of it when Galba shows up and suddenly I'm hiding in cellars.'
'My heart bleeds.'
He wasn't listening. 'I'll tell you another thing that damned near broke my heart,' he went on. 'Every time I played something or sang something, it'd always be the same, even if I'd played like an elephant and sung like a crow, everybody in the room would start clapping and cheering and carrying on like I was Apollo himself, and the only reason they clapped was because they were afraid
for their lives, didn't want to end up in the slate quarries, like Sulpicius Asper. And you know what?' he went on. 'That just wasn't fair, because — well, I'm not Homer or Pindar or Anacreon, I'm not even Virgil or that smug little creep Ovid, and my voice is all right but nothing special, even when I was young and everybody was telling me how wonderful I was, I knew that. But some of my stuff was good, I know that too. Once or twice, just occasionally, I got it right and I produced something with some quality to it, but nobody plays my stuff now, of course, and everybody thinks it must all have been rubbish, and that's simply not fair. Like I said, if I'd had the camp whore for a mother and I'd grown up in the Subura, chances are that I could go into a wine shop in the city and mention my name, and someone'd turn round and say, Hey, aren't you the chap who wrote that thing, the one that goes ta-tumptytumpty-tum, and he'd buy me a drink. You know, that's all I ever wanted, and it's the one thing I could never ever have.'
'How sad. How utterly fucking tragic. Oddly enough, all I ever wanted was to sleep in a proper bed and go into a wine shop and have enough money for a jug of wine and a plate of tripe, and not have to keep looking over my shoulder in case the guard drops by And that's what I could never have. But then, I never learned to play the flute, so what would I know?'
He looked at me and shook his head. 'You don't understand,' he said.
'Too right I don't,' I replied. 'Of course, there were things I did have. I had my very own hoe, back on the farm, and any time I wanted I could walk up the mountain and spend all day smashing bloody great clods of dirt with it.
Blisters, now, I could have all the blisters I liked, and there was never anybody saying, It's not fair, why does Galen get to do all the hard work and not me? Dammit,' I said, 'I even had a brother once. Not for as long as I'd have liked, mind you, but it was better than nothing.'
Then he looked at me again and I was sorry I'd said that. But, like I mentioned, I was in the mood for a good fight. I wanted him to get angry But he wouldn't play, just slumped back on the floor and stared up at the roof I sighed. 'It's all right. I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. And yes, in a way I can see what you're getting at, because you had so much and you lost it all, and I never had anything worth spit, so big deal. It must've been hard for you.'
He shook his head. 'That wouldn't have mattered. Oh, you don't believe me, but it's true. There's been times, this last ten years, when I wake up in the morning and I can't remember what it was like, living in the Golden House and never wearing the same shoes twice. It seems so bloody ridiculous — all that effort and money, and I never actually noticed. It amazes me how little I've missed all of it.
So yes, I know that if only I could've been me, instead of always having to be someone else, some character in a scam, or nobody at all when we're on the run and keeping our heads down — if I could've been me, and gone around the place singing and playing, passing round a hat or standing up on a cart outside inns, I could've been so happy I'd never have wanted anything more. But instead ...'
He shrugged. 'Too late now,' he said, and then he grinned. 'You know what they say I said? My famous last words, before I stabbed myself? “What an artist dies with me.” You know, that's quite good, it puts it pretty well; shame I never had the talent to come up with something like that. And now here I am, about to die, and it's not even my own words, it's somebody else's, it's a quotation. That's the bloody awful truth. I'm not even as good as the lies they tell about me.
'Not as bad, either,' I said gently 'For what it's worth, I know that. You're a bit of an idiot, Lucius Domitius, and you do some pretty dumb things and you fuss like an old woman sometimes, but basically you're all right. I just thought you'd like to know that,' I added awkwardly He laughed. 'Wonderful,' he said. 'Couldn't find his arse with both hands but basically all right. What a wonderful thing to have carved on your headstone.
You've got no idea how good that makes me feel.'
He'd clearly made up his mind to be miserable, so I left him to it, and went back to walking up and down. But that wasn't any more help than it had been before. Also, I was feeling very hungry, since we hadn't had anything to eat since the inn. 'This is no good,' I said. 'So we're going to die. They still ought to feed us.'
'Oh, they'll feed us, all right. The only question is, what to?'
Then the door opened, and a short, square sergeant with no neck told us it was our time to go up in front of the magistrate. Never mind, I thought. And then I had an idea. Not one of my best, I didn't need to be told that, but better than nothing. 'Lead on, then,' I said to the sergeant. He grinned. He could see I was up to something. I could see him figuring away behind his little round black eyes.
'No you don't,' he said. 'After you.'
So I let Lucius Domitius go first, then me, then, as the sergeant came up close behind us, I kicked the cell door backwards with my heel, hard as I possibly could. For a moment there I didn't think I'd got enough oomph into it, or else he wasn't where I needed him to be, but then, as I was turning round, I heard a lovely chunky noise, like a huge apple falling off a tree. Sure enough, I'd got the bastard right on the nose, and the bump had been him falling over.
'Well, don't just stand there,' I hissed to Lucius Domitius as I dragged the door shut and shot the bolt. 'Run.'
'All right,' he said. 'Where to.?'
'How the fuck would I know?'
'Oh for—' He scowled at me, like I'd just done something really embarrassing at a diplomatic function, then he spun round and started running — up the corridor, when I'd reckoned on going down. But it was broad as it was long, since I didn't have a clue where the passage went to, up or down. The sergeant was back on his feet already, because I could hear him thumping the door with his fist while he yelled for help. Wouldn't be long before the corridor was packed with soldiers, all of them extremely pissed off at us for bashing up their mate. Whether they'd come up the corridor, or down, or both at once, remained to be seen.
'You might have told me,' Lucius Domitius yelled back at me over his shoulder as we ran, but I was too winded to explain that I'd only just thought of it on the spur of the moment, so I panted, 'Drop dead,' and left it at that.
Just as I feared, we ran into a soldier. Luckily though, we ran into a soldier, or rather Lucius Domitius did, and he was a big bloke, and the soldier was only little, though pretty tough and wiry, at that. But in a head-on collision it's sheer mass that gets the job done. Down the soldier went, with Lucius Domitius on top of him. I just managed to pull up short and jump over the pair of them, and I stopped myself by slapping both arms against the wall. Something rolled by my feet, and I saw it was the soldier's helmet — lazy sod hadn't bothered to do up his chinstrap. But that was all right, because it meant that when I kicked the soldier in the head, I didn't bust a toe.
Anyhow, I kicked him good. 'What the hell are you doing that for?' Lucius Domitius shouted.
'Get his cloak,' I said, scrabbling for the helmet. It wasn't a great fit, but it was all right. 'And what's he got under it, a breastplate?'
'Mailshirt,' Lucius Domitius answered. 'How do you get those things off? I can't see any straps.'
'Pull it over his head, I guess,' I replied. 'I don't know, do I? I wasn't the commander in chief of the Roman army for fifteen years.
It turned out to be a bit like skinning a hare. 'We haven't got time for this,'
Lucius Domitius muttered as he lugged the soldier about. 'What do you want the bloody thing for, anyway? It won't do you any good when they string you up on a cross.
The mailshirt was a better fit than the helmet, though I can tell you, it's damned hard to breathe in those things, they squeeze all the puff out of you.
'We're back to the original plan,' I said. 'Here, pass me the sword belt. Come on, it'll only take a moment if you don't stand there nattering.'
He stood up and looked down at the soldier. 'You just said it was a bloody stupid idea.'
'No, tickling the stuff from the bathhouse was a bad idea. The rest of it'
s fine. Help me with these chinstraps, I can't reach.'
We'd been longer about it than I'd have liked, but we weren't doing so bad for country folk, as my grandad used to say. Also, I'd have liked to have got the soldier out of sight, but there wasn't anywhere to put him. 'Come on,' I said.
'Let's keep going. This must lead somewhere.'
Well, of course, he'd been quite right, it was a bloody stupid idea. On the other hand it worked sort of, because we came round a corner, past a whole lot more cell doors, and saw daylight. That had to be good. But before we could get out there, a load of soldiers came up behind us.
Not so good, I thought. They've got to have seen the bashed-up guard and know what we'd done. Running for it was about all I could think of, and I didn't reckon much to it.
Then something wonderful happened. The soldier in front stopped dead, stuck his chest out, tucked his chin in, and saluted.
Well, like I said, I'm not the former supreme commander of twenty legions, I can't tell a lance-corporal from a regular squaddie just by looking at his belt buckles, or whatever it is you tell rank by 'You got one of them, then,' the soldier said.
'No thanks to you,' I snapped back. 'Don't just stand there, for crying out loud. The other one's bound to be somewhere close.'
The soldier did the saluting thing again. 'Do you need any help with that one, chief?' he asked.
'I can manage,' I replied. 'Now get on and do as you're told.'
'The other one, chief, he's armed and dangerous. Left one of our mob out cold just down the passageway 'What, that little Greek squirt?' I said. 'Stone me, he didn't look like he could bust his way out of a cobweb.'
