The three circle tattoos on his face across each cheekbone told of his stature in the eyes of the god. His blue-fatted hair told of his inborn status before his fellow warriors. His destiny was foretold to lead the Wolves’ Brotherhood to glory against the Iron People’ king. His destiny was to seal the attacking king’s doom with the cunning of a stalking wolf.
Diurapneus wondered what to do with his two children. Kill them to avoid some cruel outrage at the hands of the Iron People? The enemy were known to use the young to satisfy their earthier appetites. Or herd the two into the forest’s vastness to wander alone and die of hunger or be eaten by forest creatures? Leave them to face alone the forest’s night demons, sprites, and ghouls? Or let them live to take their chances at the mercy of the enemy until Zalmoxis himself steals them to his Underworld some later day?
When the riders with their crested helmets and lances came glinting closer to view Diurapneus now knew how retreat to the Land Of Death was the most honorable path to a warrior’s glory. The shame of capture and being ceremoniously strangled at Rome before the Iron People masses was not an option.
He kissed the young prince and his sister farewell, and blessed them in the name of God Zalmoxis. He leaned close to his son’s ear and whispered ancient oaths. He swore the child to fulfill his princely destiny in the name of Zalmoxis by revenging his father and mother’s death. He extracted an oath of honor from the wide-eyed shivering boy as his sister listened close-by. The princeling uttered the oath loudly for all the trees and leaves of the forest to hear and record forever among the swirling winds and rustling leaves of Nature.
‘By the great god Zalmoxis and his sacred lineage of kings, I Dromichaetes, Prince of the Getae, swear to take revenge upon the King of the Iron People. I swear to kill his loved ones before his very eyes, just as my father’s loved one has died. I seal this oath among the leaves and winds of the forest by my own sacred blood!’ the little boy called aloud in a wavering voice into the wooded density around him.
‘Farewell my children until we meet again before Zalmoxis himself!’ the elder proclaimed with gusto.
Diurapneus grasped his bill-hooked dagger and rent at his own throat in a single slash. Streaming gore burst over the moldy bark of the fallen trunk of a forest tree trunk with the force of a stallion’s piss. His body fell beside his wife, their blood soaking fallen leaves.
‘Father! Father!’ the princeling called again and again.
His sister buried her face into the furs enveloping the boy’s bony frame.
The children had seen such sprays of scarlet many times before when the womenfolk of the Wolf Warriors tormented and slaughtered captives of the Iron People. The prisoners were trussed like sheep. They sawed off the heads of the squirming, squawking captives to offer victory sacrifice to their God.
From communal cups they would sip the warm salty blood of their enemies and lick blood-tipped fingers. They shelved the cut heads around the forest altar of the god and poured the victims’ life-blood over their own faces as a food for the deity. The Wolf Warriors laughed aloud at the ironies of life and death. They danced ecstatically to the throb of tambours of human skin and the strum of stretched gut.
‘The tyrant has deceived us! The coward has taken his own life!’
The lead rider of the Iron People troop, cavalry captain Tiberius Claudius Maximus of the ala II Pannoniorum auxiliaries, was angered by the king’s too easy escape to his Underworld of Zalmoxis. In his mind Maximus could hear Diurapneus laughing at him from the Beyond.
He stripped the king’s body of its weapons, furs, jewels, and gold medallions, severed the dead man’s head with his own hooked sword, and tore off his bejeweled right arm. Each would be proof of the Dacian’s destruction for the Iron King himself, Caesar Trajan, and his senior commander Hadrian.
The seven-year-old princeling probably thought the same fate would occur to his sister and himself, but he was proved wrong.
‘What have we here? A royal princeling and his sister? Well that’s something of value perhaps!’ Maximus called to the troop of Iron People legionaries.
The two children were thrust into a wooden cage on wooden wheels intended for securing the captured Decebelus, and trundled laboriously overland to the Roman forces. It took two days to return to Trajan’s encampment beneath the smoldering ruin of the fortress at stony Sarmizegethusa.
Dromichaetes and Estia were put on display to the troops. The two clung to each other secured behind the cage’s sturdy timbers while the Roman soldiers in iron armor bearing iron weapons shouted harsh words at them and cast handfuls of wet animal dung at the cage.
‘A sweet lad. Weedy but sturdy,’ Trajan declared to his officers, ‘and sufficiently young to educate in our ways. As a prince of his race a portion of his father’s treasure is to be endowed to his upkeep and training. He will be a hostage ward of the State assigned to a noble family. He will blossom, and may have value in some future strategy of state. Hadrian enjoys mentoring young men. Allocate the Dacian prince to my commander.’
Trajan ignored Dromichaetes’ sister, Estia, who possessed only marital value between contending communities. Yet the antagonism against the children ceased from that moment and their protection and sustenance improved greatly.
The captured high priest of Zalmoxis, old Dicineus of the blue-fatted braids and the elegant tattoos curling into deep facial creases, whispered to the young ones how they were safe for the time being.
Dicineus, an advisor of their father’s, understood the Roman speech and the Roman ways. Dicineus was the architect of the Daci Wolf’s policy. It was also he who, with his family members and children, officiated in the sacrifice of Roman captives. He knew his days were numbered with his Roman captors. Zalmoxis now beckoned him too. Security for his own offspring was his immediate priority after attending to the Decebelus’s progeny.
‘My Lord and Lady, children of the Decebelus, I bring good news to you. Your fate is well favored. The Iron People’s king, Caesar Trajan, has cast his grace upon you,’ the old man rasped. ‘You will not be sent to the Underworld to join your ancestors, as others of us may. You’ll be taken under the protection of his commander and friend, the Roman general Publius Aelius Hadrianus, who is an important senator and praetor at Rome.’
‘Tell me Priest Dicineus, who is this commander Hadrianus? Is he worthy of us?’ the boy prince demanded of his aged advisor and tutor in the imperious style of a true aristocrat.
‘You will shortly see, my Prince,’ Dicineus replied with a deeply deferential bow to the seven-year old. ‘But be assured, this is a gesture to your advantage and to your sister Estia’s advantage. Take my advice, my child. Welcome this opportunity. See where it may lead. It has possibilities.’
Hadrian looked down upon Dromichaetes from his high seat. It was the very same throne from which Diurapneus, the boy’s father, had until recently pronounced rule upon the Getae. With Dicineus as the translator, the Roman commander questioned the boy.
‘Tell him to proclaim his pedigree, Priest. Let him tell me of his quality in his own words,’ Hadrian instructed. He then sat back to observe the boy’s responses and manner.
The muddied, soil-clothed, disheveled princeling stood steadily before his interrogator to call out in his reedy voice a well-rehearsed litany of names, titles, honorifics, and tribal clan relationships. He did it with shrill gusto. They were proclaimed in the hard guttural consonants of his native language in the proud manner the boy had heard his father declaim similar lists of honor.
‘This boy has a noble’s manner, Priest. He deserves watching, in more ways than one,’ the Roman commander offered.
Hadrian was actually moved by the child’s courage and dignity. He smiled at the miniature warrior standing before him and nodded approvingly to Dicineus.
‘The lad, as a barbarian, possesses a paler skin than we Romans. I assume the tattoos on each cheek with three circles proclaim his supposed bloodline from your cruel god, yes?
H
e’s also a hand or so taller than a seven year old of our Mediterranean world, even though generally you Dacians are not a physically imposing people. Your breeding, your diet, your angular bodily shape, your bad teeth, your lack of common cleanliness or baths, and your barbarous habits all lack the finesse of the Empire’s subjects. Yet this wiry princeling displays promise of future merit.’
‘I am pleased that my captor approves of the child,’ Dicineus dissembled with much bowing. ‘I too have children who carry my seed and the sacred blood of Zalmoxis. Perhaps I and my family have found favor in the commander’s eyes as well? Children, at least, deserve to live.’
Hadrian smiled patiently but enigmatically.
‘Begin the boy’s instruction in spoken Latin. He is to be prepared for display at Caesar’s victory Triumph at Rome.’
After the winter snows abated Prince Dromichaetes and Estia were brought from the rugged ranges of their homeland to the warmer climate of Italy far away to the south.
Princess Estia was taken one night into separate protection elsewhere, unexplained to the princeling. Her brother never saw her again and his pride demanded he wouldn’t ask.
Now in his eighth year, Dromichaetes walked on his short child’s legs behind Trajan’s grand chariot with its spirited chargers along the Sacred Way of Rome. The emperor’s Triumph paraded amid the raucous crowds of the great city.
The lad was awed at the spectacle of high stone structures, sweeping flights of staircases, wide avenues, marble columns, and whole buildings of red brick and white marble. It was so contrasting to the rough-cut stony ramparts, timbered palisades, or muddy daub and straw-roofed huts of his Dacia homeland.
He was chained in fine golden bonds to an officer’s wrist. Two other aristocrat captives of the Getae were shackled in hard iron together. The traitor of the Dacians, Bicilis, once the king’s best friend who turned to the Romans to reveal the hiding place of a vast treasure cleverly buried beneath a river’s bed, along with Dicineus the priest, were tethered side-by-side for display to the city.
As Trajan’s Triumph progressed through the avenues, arches, and circuses of the great city amid the roar of the crowds, the two tried to raise the boy’s spirits with jokes and smiles and heroic bravado. His little legs tried to keep up with the officer’s restrained pace. He stumbled to the flagstones again and again but scrambled nimbly to his feet each time. His wolf-fur cloak, tattoos, and blue-tinted braids conveyed to the Roman crowd’s eyes a portrait of a typical barbarian enemy, but in amusingly miniature, unthreatening dimensions.
Following after the emperor’s chariot marched cohorts of the Roman Legions of the Dacian campaign. Officers and troops of the fourteen Legions progressed proudly through the crowded Circus Maximus to the Sacred Way, past the high arches of the colossal Flavian Amphitheatre, and on to the ancient Forum, the official centre of the Empire.
They chanted ribald marching rhymes accusing their beloved emperor of lusty obscenities and vivid sexual excesses, the plausible priapic tokens of his proven gift for victory and booty. Their saucy limericks spared no reputed peccadillo.
The Legions were followed by fifty wagons of captured treasures or weapons and chained rows of captives. Ten thousand prisoners of fighting age shuffled sullen and subdued, tethered together in hemp and shackles, amid the catcalls of the plebs of Rome.
The cavalry captain Tiberius Claudius Maximus rode a charger holding the brine-pickled skull of the Decebelus aloft atop a pilum spear. An aide paraded with his severed right arm impaled on a captured wolf-tail lance. These crumbling remnants of the vanquished king were held high so Roman citizens could savor his defeat, witness his shame, and celebrate his submission to Rome’s virile dominance. They shook rude gestures with their fists and shouted obscenities as the desiccated remains passed by.
Later when wine and feasting had loosened the city’s manners, the pickled head was ceremoniously flung down the city’s sacred staircase, the Scalae Gemoniae, as a formal insult from the Senate and People of Rome to a crushed enemy.
The skull lobbed and slipped and bounced down the majestic flight into a sewer’s gutter at the bottom. Then it was cast into the turbulence of the River Tiber racing through embankments close by.
Dicineus and Bicilis were taken to the same staircase, pressed to their knees, and slowly garroted by sturdy men wielding thin nooses. Their broken bodies too were cast into the Tiber. The crowds and assembled patricians of Rome cheered themselves hoarse at their public humiliation.
But Dromichaetes was not harmed in the Triumph celebrations despite him being of the same blood as the enemy. Nevertheless the boy’s declining status as a prince of the Getae was slowly becoming apparent to him. No one was bowing to him anymore.
Hadrian encouraged the boy to be receptive to friendliness. The lad learned quickly.
However, the young Wolf Warrior’s names and titles were difficult to pronounce in Latin. Hadrian abbreviated the name into something more easily pronounced. Among the florid list of attributes Dromichaetes proclaimed in the Greek patois of his native tongue was the name for the Daci Tribes of his homeland. This word was “Getae”. Hadrian identified these two repeated syllables in the staccato flow of consonants and gutturals babbled by the princeling but which no longer possessed any consequence in the new era ruled by Rome.
‘Getae? Yes, so I will call you Geta,’ he said with ready satisfaction to the child chained at his feet. ‘You are of The Getae, so I will call you Geta.’
This leading senator, general, praetor, and tribune of Rome inaugurated his personal beckoning call for the stripling chained at his feet. It was to be “Geta”. The list of privileges and distinctions forged in ancient wars by the boy’s father and his father’s fathers before him, were now compressed into these two tight syllables. Eventually Dromichaetes came to understand the symbolism perfectly.
But his oath to Zalmoxis on behalf of his father also continued to ring through his mind night-by-night, day-by-day, month-by-month. His father’s shame was seared deep into his very heart.
‘Revenge me, my son!’ resounded through his mind. ‘By Zalmoxis, kill the Iron People King’s loved ones just as his soldiers killed me and mine! Kill his loved ones too, in honor’s revenge, my son!’
Geta had begun to adapt to his new world and his new status in life as well as his new name. Yet a single memory lingered. It was an image of that bony orb shedding flecks of decayed flesh as it bobbed and bounced and skidded down the steep incline of the Scalae Gemoniae. He could hear the surrounding throng shout and cheer and hiss as it descended.
One day, the boy mused to himself, he too would find an opportunity to deprive the Iron People’s king of a loved one. Then the oath to Zalmoxis would be fulfilled and his father’s honor appeased for all eternity ---.”
Tiberius Claudius Maximus’s report sent a chill through Suetonius and his staff at the Imperial Secretariat. In the gloomy high-columned marble arcades of the Secretariat flanking the Palatine slope at Rome the cavalier’s tale was deemed worthy of storing against future eventualities. But that was many years ago.
Now in Egypt as Caesar’s Special Inspector, Suetonius recalled the testimony and its covert threat. He wondered at its relevance a quarter century later in understanding today’s Geta of Dacia, who is now a grown man in his thirties? How much of that threat has survived so long a period, he wondered?
CHAPTER 4
Julius Vestinus’s chambers were dressed in the stately style expected of the emperor’s primary secretary. Busts of his patron Hadrian, the empress Sabina, the former emperor Trajan, various ancient philosophers of Greece or heroes of Rome, along with plaster face masks of Vestinus’s own ancestors, cluttered the space.
Vestinus was a generation in age beneath Suetonius, yet already the pressures of his job were evident in his features. Vestinus was the second incumbent as Hadrian’s secretary since Suetonius’s dismissal eight years earlier, so the biographer could easily appreciate the rigors of his chores. He w
ould be a busy fellow at all sorts of hours and not always thanked for it.
Vestinus would also be party to numberless details about the management of the Empire, its ever-drifting politics, who was currently in favor, who was on a slippery slope out, and who might be absolutely doomed.
But it also crossed Suetonius’s mind how Julius Vestinus could already know more about Antinous’ death than it would be politic to disclose? Suetonius sized up his target and began the investigative journey as he sipped some wine.
“I say, Julius, this is a good drop you have here. Falernian, yes? I’m surprised it’s traveled so well. Here we are in the Egyptian desert miles from any real civilization, and we have the pleasure of real Falernian.”
Suetonius could see Vestinus was flattered by the comment, as he expected. The biographer knew how power and influence are sometimes expressed more impressively by discreet gesture than by grandiose display.
“Was Antinous much of a drinker himself, do you think?” he added perfunctorily, hoping to widen a door on this subject. “Did wine have anything to do with his death, I wonder?”
Vestinus paused for a considered moment
“Not that I was aware of, Suetonius. He seemed to enjoy wine, but I don’t recall him ever being drunk. It’s often wiser to drink wine than risk local water when traveling. I only occasionally saw him tipsy, yes, but never drunk. Not in my presence, anyway. He was very sporty, so I think he tried to keep a clear head for the hunt or for his athletics. He was young and lively after all.”
Vestinus had loosened up a little. Falernian, even when watered, moves tongues swiftly.
“Well, what do you think has happened here, Julius?” Suetonius asked as casually and innocently as he could manage.
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