The Kingdom of the Wicked

by Anthony Burgess

  The fire spread east as well as north, as far as the Caelian. The Temple of the Divine Claudius was the core of a terrible conflagration in which the houses of priests and augurs went up in spite of prayers that the flapping of the flames drowned. Men and women in undress or full dress blackened and smoking at the hems ran the streets moaning, carrying household treasures of no value. The Temple of Isis seemed to put out a hand of Egyptian magic to forbid the passage of fire further to the east; it was obeyed. To the north of the city, in the area enclosed by the Pantheon, the Mausoleum of Augustus and the Castra Urbana, fire raged that seemed to owe nothing to the colonising zeal of the scarlet empire to the south, for the Baths of Agrippa, the Temple of Jupiter, and the headquarters of the city vigiles were a zone untouched by even the tips of the fingers of the terror.

  Pagan Romans, those who had sat with their gristly sausages and skins of watered wine howling for the real red at the games, stacked and ranked in a semblance of mock civic order, were now thousands of ants scurrying from the fist dinged and dinged and dinged again on their hills. What do we care about them, Canus and Capys and the Casca brothers, Cestius and Crassus and Domitilla and Fausta and Augusta and the dancing girls just in from Alexandria, Polla and Vettius, the brothel madam Omphale, Macro and Marius, the Salnatores and Livius and Livilla and? Little, since we do not know them. But Caleb and his wife Hannah and their son Yacob we have at least met. They were tenement dwellers in the north of District XII, with two rooms on the fifth floor. They were in bed, and they woke to strange light and heat and noise. ‘The skies are on fire!’ Hannah screamed, and she grasped the sleeping boy. In their night attire they fell over each other to the door and saw men and women scampering, all tangled hair and bare legs, down the stairway, children clutched and howling. Caleb ordered his wife to stay behind him, clutching his robe with one hand and their son with the other, as he proceeded brutally to fist his way through the gasping and coughing throng that grew thicker at each new landing of the stairway, all eager to crush each other and be crushed and then to be eaten by the flames that waited at the great door of the tenement building. ‘Now!’ Caleb cried, and they thrust down to the second landing, clawed back at, clutched, bleeding. In the wall was an open casement and beneath it a clutch of young arbutus well lighted by flames from the left but itself as yet untouched. ‘Now!’ he yell-coughed, then he leapt out to the air. The bush broke his fall and he stood barefoot on hot earth. ‘Throw him!’ She threw the child blindly, and Caleb as he caught him had no time to be puzzled that the boy was not a yelling wheel of limbs but strangely still as though sleeping through it all. He placed the child on the ground while Hannah hurled herself at his arms from the high window. He caught her. She picked up Yacob. The boy bled heavily from the head. Was that bare bone showing through? She could not scream, only cough her heart out at the hidden heavens. They ran with the body south and hardly stopped till they reached the triple junction of the Via Ardeatina, the Via Latina and the Via Appia. Here there was no fire, only a huddle of moaning mourning bereft.

  Marcus Julius Tranquillus and his wife and daughter were safe on the Janiculum, as most of the Christians were safe on the Viminal and Esquiline. The Jews had suffered down there in Districts XII and XIII, their shops ruined, cheap wooden houses charcoal fringed with fire sated. Those on the outskirts of the fire on the Caelian saw Rome burn to the north-west, the Palatine too. Some, looting, were drunk and saw more. Julius Caesar marched a flaming legion through the streets, Romulus and Remus sucked fire from the dugs of a wolf that was all fire, it was rumoured that the Tiber was all aflame with the oil that had rolled heavily into it from the store south of the Circus Flaminius. Jupiter rode a flaming winged bull over the flames, picking up gobbets of flame in his hands and hurling them high in joy. The Vestal Virgins held up flaming skirts to show flaming pudenda. Over the bridge that led from the Capitoline to the Naumachia Augusti the screaming ants scurried, with no eyes for the imperial barge moored to the Tiburine island just to their north. There the Emperor and his entourage watched the fire march and blare over the Circus Maximus to the Palatine, indifferently crunching and swallowing the fine parkland and the gorgeous palaces. Tigellinus said, deeply moved by the purple and gold majesty of the invading army of flame, that there was virtue in catastrophe, that now Rome, or Neropolis if that was to be its new name, had to be remade, even the Senate must see that. Nero said, trembling as if on the brief road to orgasm:

  ‘There’s no art like this. No music or lyric verse or tragedy like this. At last I see what I’ve only sung before. End of the second Troy, birthpangs of the third and last.’ And he sang:

  ‘Richly enrobed in the flames of her funeral,

  Ilium yielded her limbs to the fingers of fire,

  Lovingly, lustingly, cooing like columbines,

  Roaring like lions and howling like wolves of the wood …’

  But he felt the despair of even the major artist at the inadequacy of words. The huge smoke pall had blotted out stars and moon, the tiny smut bats flew in massive disorganised hordes, smoke choked, Rome was eaten steadily, the blackened marble not yielding but the hidden supports of wood chewed to nothing, the metal struts buckling in their white heat. And all the time, across the river, the screams and groans and manic coughing of a city that had suffered before as all cities must suffer but never before like this. Rome had had her fire watch for two hundred years, trained men with water-pumps in their station just west of the Via Lata, but the strong dry wind blew fire up at them from the south and they retreated hopeless. Only with the sudden shift of the wind to the north-west did it seem possible to shove the fire back from the threatened Forum and the northern edge of the Palatine. But it was too late for the rescue ladders and the damp blankets huge as fields in the stricken streets of the tenements. The citizens of Suburra, the Quirinal and the Esquiline came down with slow timidity to the Gardens of Maecenas and the fringe of what was to be the Domus Aurea to see those who had flung themselves north of the horror with a kind of sick wonder but also the desire to help, but they felt helpless in the face of maddened women with charred hair screaming over the charred bodies of their children. The smell of Rome had become the smell of a barber’s singeing multiplied a manic millionfold.

  Peter, whose new home was the shop of Aquila, since he could no longer face the climb to Linus’s apartment, spoke of Sodom and Gomorrah, but the Gentiles did not comprehend the reference. It was the task of Christians to give aid to the stricken, but what help could they give except prayer? Those who lay stricken in the Gardens of Maecenas or in the streets in the triangle whose base was the Via Praenestina looked up in weak bewilderment to see an old bearded man with a staff raise spread fingers over them and mutter magic spells in an uncouth language. Luke the physician brought his scrip of ointments but stood impotent over hard dry blackened flesh beyond mere soothing. There was terrible thirst about and it could be slaked, but too often it was a viaticum before a sleep from which there was no rousing. Catullus strode glowing like a cinder muttering about una nox dormienda.

  Dawn fought its way through the pall, which was drifting to the south-east. It would have been better if the night had continued, hiding the poor blackened corpses, the timbers whose dying glow could be roused to a brief curse of flame in the dawn breeze. The stench was insupportable, the black flinders flew languidly, burnt-out groves sent, in the stronger wind of full morning, flurries of skeletal leaves, substance eaten but veins miraculously whole. The nakedness brought a new obscenity: the city had cast off the clothes of its foliage to glory in the visible horror of its mutilation. For two days corpses lay untended for the rats to gnaw. In the dying smoke a smoky figure or two could be seen stumbling bowed over and through the ruins, searching and not finding or else, in crazed automatism, affirming life through aimless locomotion. On the third day the Senate called itself together and found some of its members missing. None knew where the Emperor was: it was rumoured that he had transferred himself and the remn
ant of his court to quarters in the Castra Praetoria. Gaius Calpurnius Piso was elected head of a small body of inquiry into the causes of the fire which still smouldered and occasionally flared. The group glumly trod rubble, jumped away from sudden disclosures of healthy flame beneath it, put togas over noses in the presence of black cadavers. On the Aventine they met, as they thought they might, Tigellinus and a maniple of Praetorians. He was waiting for Caesar. Who arrived in a litter. With him was the Empress, clearly pregnant. Piso introduced himself, stating the Senate’s business.

  ‘—And, of course, to supervise the provision of places of refuge for the unfortunate victims.’

  ‘I know you, Piso, don’t think I don’t. You rebuked me in the Senate for various derelictions whose nature I can’t clearly remember. Can nobody do anything about this stench? See, the Empress is being made sick by it all.’ A senator made a token gesture of waving the stink away. ‘Well,’ Nero said, ‘as to the homeless, poor souls, your Emperor has already made certain arrangements. The imperial gardens are at their disposal, and carpenters and tentmakers are already providing temporary shelters. Also, of course, the Campus Martius is being made ready for housing what I fear must be an incomputable number of sick and homeless. Messengers have been sent to Ostia to bring in emergency supplies. Things are being taken care of. Did you anticipate otherwise?’

  ‘We marvel at the speed with which Caesar has put things into operation.’

  ‘Reverend senators, we shall meet tomorrow to discuss the raising of finances for the rebuilding of the city. There is not a moment to be lost.’

  ‘Has Caesar,’ Piso asked, ‘any notion of how this disaster may have started?’

  ‘Oh, Rome has always been a terrible place for fires. These wooden shops and tenements, oil lamps, sudden strong winds. On this occasion we have been more unfortunate than usual.’ But he could not help seeming to smile. ‘But think of the phoenix, the resurrection, that sort of thing. We must always look on the bright side. One of these days, and it may be soon, you will look on a Rome to be proud of.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ Tigellinus said to his master, walking beside the northward-jolting litter, ‘they will want to fix the blame somewhere.’

  ‘Why? An act of the gods, an accident. Rome has known it before.’

  ‘May I put it another way. They will feel happier, if you can talk of such an emotion, if they have someone to blame. If I may say so, Caesar, you’ve talked too much about the great phoenix Neropolis.’

  ‘Every emperor has talked, and freely too, of finding brick and leaving marble.’

  ‘This Emperor is no darling of the Senate. It is the Senate that will want to fix the blame in one particular direction. Your trouble will begin with the finance bills. The Senate will talk of starving the legions in the provinces to pay for Caesar’s folly.’

  ‘It is no folly. You have seen the plans. The plans are a masterpiece of ah planning.’

  ‘I’ve seen the plans. You have not been backward in showing the plans. Everybody has seen the plans. They have not been rushed into being to meet an emergency. Those plans have been around for more than a year.’

  ‘Oh, longer, longer, Tigellinus. I’ve had the dream a long time.’

  ‘I think Caesar will have to pay a little money out of his own purse before he can even dream of putting those plans into operation.’

  ‘Money? To whom?’

  Tigellinus sighed deeply, then coughed: there was still acrid smoke about. ‘Well, I would suggest a certain senator named Vettius Caprasius. Quite an orator. He will implant some of the right ideas.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Leave all this to me.’

  It was a week later that a demure Nero sat in the senate house, listening to an eloquent Vettius Caprasius, a lean man in early middle age, who told Caesar and the Senate who were the people who started the fire.

  ‘Caesar, reverend senators, I rise to report on the findings of the special commission appointed to enquire into the causes of the recent devastating conflagration that struck and crippled our city. Documents, letters, depositions – all of which the Senate is encouraged to examine at its leisure – point to an inescapable conclusion. The fire was an outrage perpetrated by a dissident group of this city, one that despises Rome, flouts the gods, regards the traditional Roman virtues – including those military virtues which built and sustain an empire – as totally derisory. Not the Jews, oh no. The Jews have suffered as much as any yet have been quick to contribute lavishly to the reconstruction fund. I refer to the Christians or Chrestians, a sect favoured by slaves, plebeians, perverts and foreigners, to whom vice is virtue and virtue vice. Well known for such hideous secret practices as cannibalism and incest, for refusing patriotic service of all kinds, including the taking of arms against Rome’s enemies, they are at last revealed as terrorists and incendiaries. It is proposed that a new commission be formed to drag these loathsome reptiles out of their holes and to deal with them not according to the dictates of the law but in obedience to our impulses of disgust and outrage. We do not try mad dogs in courts of justice; we kill them outright. They bade our city suffer. They must suffer themselves.’

  ‘Oh, surely if we fined them,’ Nero put in over the growls and murmurs, ‘heavily that is, justice would be satisfied?’

  ‘As always, Caesar is too soft-hearted. Let just indignation take its inexorable course.’

  Not all the Senate agreed. Many of the Senate had a fair idea of what was going on. But there was no harm in letting the suffering people get at the Christians; it stopped them from clawing at the senators, who had already been inveighed against by mob orators as defective fathers and cold-hearted self-servers with villas untouched by the fire. Why, even Caesar himself had suffered: he wept bitterly over the ruined Palatine. Tigellinus quietly paid a mob to howl against the Christians and augment itself in a march on a house insolently near to the Imperial Forum. They knew the day to choose – Dies solis, when this atheistic lot got together to stew babies and eat them. The house belonged to a Greek master tailor named Lemos because he was goitrous, and the mob was delighted to find him presiding over a meal of white meat and Greek wine with others, men, women and children, of his filthy persuasion. The white meat, they swore, was really bread: taste it. It tasted like bread but the mob knew it was really meat. They spat it on the floor then went into the kitchen, where they made brands out of firewood and then began to inflame the house. Let these bastards get burnt like poor decent Romans did. They went further; they made a fire in front of the house, feeding it with furniture, books and bedclothes. Then they threw on it the smallest Christian child they could find, save the poor little swine from these bastards’ cannibalism. The adult Christians, who were supposed to turn the other cheek of the arse they’d been battered on, turned very nasty and clawed the righteous mob. They were thrown on the fire too, some of them.

  It was then that the military took over. Christians had deliberately burnt this house which belonged to a decent Greek Roman named Lemos, who had a contract for making uniforms for the Praetorian Guard. Ergo they were incendiarists. Ergo they had set the city on fire. The soldiers set up under orders ten-foot stakes at six-foot intervals in the charred earth of the residential areas that had suffered most, and to these they bound Christians, men, women and children, soaked them in pitch and set light to them with torches. It was not hard to find the Christians. They did not deny what they were and they made a cabbalistic sign in the form of a cross when they were arrested. But of course they did not get all the Christians: there were too many of them.

  They did not get Marcus Julius Tranquillus, for instance. As they packed, Sara scolded him. ‘I said from the first, you should never have got mixed up with them.’

  ‘Nonsense. Paul warned us we’d be scapegoats for something. Thank God we got the warning in time.’

  ‘Paul – Paul – First he’s responsible for a shipwreck, now for a fire. I didn’t like the look of the man.’

  ‘You
’re talking foolishly, woman. There’ll be time to knock the nonsense out of you when we’re safe in Pompeii.’