Conspiracies of Rome Read online

  In Rome, things had continued much as before, though under noble patronage. At last, about a hundred years after the switch to Christianity, some Eastern monk – Telemachus, his name – had run into the arena during a particularly bloody contest, trying to part the gladiators. The outraged mob stoned him to death and insisted that the games should continue. But the emperor was got at by his priests and banned the games.

  For some while after, the Colosseum was used for wild beast hunts and executions. But then the money ran out and the doors were locked shut. Since then, the place had stood empty like the other main public buildings. Those that hadn’t yet fallen down or been destroyed were subject to further orders – from the prefect, or the exarch, or the emperor himself. In most cases, orders had never come.

  And so the Colosseum stood in empty silence. Every so often, someone bribed a permit out of the prefect to take away materials for building. But the sands of the arena had for generations before my visit been unstained by human blood.

  While a little cloud obscured the moon, I heard a shuffling far across the sands. As the cloud passed, I saw a dark procession approaching us in the still night air. Perhaps five men were coming towards us. They were dressed from their hoods down in black. Behind them, slaves carried a small brazier heaped with glowing coals. Behind them came some black animal led with a chain that shone silver in the moonlight.

  ‘O Basilius, my lord, you are come at last to this place of silent magic. You are come to commune with the God and to seek what the future may hold for you. The sacrifice is prepared for your performing. Make ready for the solemn compact with the Ancient One who was before we became. Make ready.’

  It was the first of the hooded procession who spoke in a deep, resonant voice. It filled that vast stone valley with its volume. The brazier was set down in the centre of the arena. Beside it was placed a wooden table and chairs. Beyond this, a black stone cube of about three feet was already standing.

  As Lucius stepped forward, a slave met him with a bowl of water and black cloths. He bowed his head, looking away, as Lucius washed his hands with slow, deliberate movements. Lucius shook his head as the slave looked quizzically at me.

  ‘This time, he is here only to observe,’ he explained. ‘Perhaps next time.’

  Lucius fell silent, stood still beside the stone. The others started a slow, rhythmical chant:

  O God immortal, to whom

  Is the Empire of Life and Death,

  And the Realm of Silent Shades,

  And all the places covered by night –

  Make unto us, your servants,

  Visible what is dark,

  Showing what is now,

  And what once was,

  And what is yet to become.

  This offering we make to you,

  That you may give to us.

  Accept, accept, O God Immortal,

  And give unto us in return.

  As the chanting died away, the hooded priest cried three times for silence. ‘Procul, O procul, este profani’ he added. ‘Away, away, be all unclean.’

  Lucius moved to face the stone altar with the east before him, his arms stretched out. His lips moved in silent prayer. I strained to hear what he might be asking, but his lips moved without a voice.

  As he finished and his arms came down beside him, what I now saw was a goat with a perfectly black hide was brought forward. Water was dribbled on its head, as in a baptism.

  ‘See,’ the hooded priest intoned, ‘the beast is unafraid. All is ready according to ancient custom.’

  Lucius covered his head with a fold of his cloak. He took the goat by its chain. Slaves lifted it with practised ease onto the altar before him. The hooded man uncovered a knife that had been carried by one of the others. He held it up in the moonlight. It had no glint. Lucius took the knife in his right hand. Holding the goat with his left hand, he drew the knife with a single motion, and stepped quickly back as the animal sank twitching onto the block. I saw no blood, but heard it gushing onto the altar.

  ‘The Lord has given a clean death,’ the hooded priest spoke again. ‘The beast has moved without sense of motion into the realms of darkness. It is as ancient custom requires.’ He took out another knife and slit open the goat’s belly, drawing out its entrails. He examined these by the light of a small lantern.

  ‘O Noble Basilius, great seed of ancient greatness,’ he intoned, ‘you have asked for what you would have, and the God has granted all that you ask. Behold, the liver is unspotted. The entrails are pure throughout. Your sacrifice is accepted. Let the God give all that you ask in the manner of His choosing. His will shall prevail!’

  Lucius placed his hands on the now-still goat and drew them away, black in the moonlight. He prayed silently again for a short while, then nodded.

  The animal was skinned, its hide and entrails thrown on the fire, which now burned black. There was a sprinkling of oil and wine on the altar. Wine was spilled onto the ground with another brief invocation. The rest of the goat was cut into strips and roasted on the clear part of the coals. We all sat together round the table, now set with bread and wine, and waited for our share to be cooked. Slaves and free sat mingled together, drinking the same wine.

  And that was it. I had attended my first pagan sacrifice.

  It was obvious at the time we had done something illegal. If this sort of thing got the priests in Kent in a regular sweat, there seemed no saying what they would think of seeing it done in Rome, barely a mile from the Lateran. I later learnt that it carried the same penalties as treason – that is, the punishment could be really unpleasant. I once saw a high government official in Constantinople ripped apart by hyenas in the Circus – and he had only consulted an old oracle outside the city gates. We had performed a nocturnal sacrifice in full, if undiscriminating, semblance of the ancient custom. No wonder it had all been so furtive.

  ‘Surely, the Ancient Gods have no power in the modern age?’ I asked the priest diplomatically. He sat beside me at the table, now unhooded. His narrow face and thin white beard went strangely with his deep voice. I could have questioned their existence, but thought that might not be in the best taste, given the circumstances.

  ‘The Ancient Gods are not dead,’ he answered. ‘They merely sleep in stones and in the quiet places, ready to be called forth by sacrifice of blood.’

  ‘And the Almighty God of the Churches,’ I asked, ‘whose priests have conquered the world – what of Him?’

  The priest frowned, pouring out more wine for himself. ‘The Galileans worship nothing more than the tribal God of the Jews. They have raised him above his proper status, and in his triumph the world has grown old.

  ‘In former ages, the smoke of sacrifice rose above every temple. Every God and every Goddess would have its proper worship. Then, the beasts of sacrifice were brought in full daylight, with sound of flutes and cymbals. Women and little children would join the joyous procession. There would be games and readings of poetry. Beautiful works of art would be raised in celebration of the gifts showered upon us by the Gods. In those days, the arms of Rome were triumphant everywhere, from the furthermost limits of the world to the shores of the Indian Ocean. Then the Galilean worship took hold – first among the slaves and the rabble of every city, then among the women of the higher classes, then at last on the emperor himself. Since Constantine disestablished the ancient worship, all has gone ill. Our cities are empty. Barbarians have taken our lands. The Persian is upon the East.

  ‘The Galileans cannot even agree among themselves. The Ancient Gods were never jealous. Each had his proper place, and never complained if another had finer temples or a more numerous worship. Now, the supposed One God has many cults, and the various devotees hate each other more than they hate the barbarians and the Persians, with whom they make common cause as the mood takes them.’ The priest finished and turned back for a second helping of meat.

  ‘And the Gods are with us yet.’ One of the priest’s deputies now spoke, a fanatica
l gleam in his eye. ‘Did you not feel the God’s presence as we called Him forth?’

  Of course I hadn’t. Before, during and after the sacrifice, all around had been the same so far as I was concerned. It was a fine spring night – but just like any other. Nevertheless, I’d had enough experience of Church miracles not to go stating the obvious. So I slightly changed the subject, asking which of the Gods had been invoked.

  ‘His name is not to be mentioned,’ the priest replied. ‘There are words and names that are only to be whispered, even among the initiated.’

  ‘But, my dear boy,’ Lucius broke in, ‘did your priests ever serve such an excellent meal after one of their interminable, corpse-worshipping services? I think not.’ He grinned, all solemnity gone, and began a scandalous story about some deacon who had been found dead of a stroke in a brothel, dressed in nothing but a slave collar and a bag over his head. To keep the story even reasonably quiet, the dispensator had been required to buy all the whores out of slavery and then get them forgiveness for all the sins they had committed and might again in future commit. I nearly choked on a piece of bread as he pranced around doing a perfect imitation of the dispensator’s pompous manner – the dispensator turned out, by the way, to be yet another of his relatives.

  Good food, excellent wine, the moon high overhead, the air still, the slight chill of the night banished by the coals of the brazier, and excellent conversation from Lucius, and much of interest from the other diners – this was everything the other dinner hadn’t been.

  Afterwards, Lucius took me on a tour of the Colosseum. The gates to the upper reaches were locked and rusted shut, so the imperial box and the better seats were off limits. I was told there was a network of tunnels underneath the arena, where the animals and human victims had waited their turn in the open. This too was barred to us. But we had free run of the lower galleries and arcades, where there had once been shops and brothels and offices and rooms for private entertainment.

  By one of the main processional gates to the arena, Lucius stopped and pointed to a slab of stone fixed to the wall. It commemorated the charity of one Decius Marius Venantius Basilius, ‘Praefectus Urbanus, Patricius, Consul Ordinarius’. After some earthquake had damaged the arena and podium, he had paid for repairs out of his own pocket. To this benefactor of the public – if not, perhaps, of the performers – Lucius was great-great-grandson.

  ‘My family had money in those days,’ he said. ‘We could pay for repairs to this place as easily as I now pay the bill in a wine shop. We had estates in Italy and Sicily and Africa, as well as in the East.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘All we had in Italy was taken by the Lombards. In Africa, the desert took everything more slowly, but just as surely. My grandfather left what we had in Sicily to the Church – he was a regular Galilean, you see. As for the East, my mother’s family lost that just recently to that lowlife bastard Phocas. I am left with a house in Rome I can’t afford to run, and a few blocks of tenements that haven’t yet fallen down.’ He shrugged and smiled in the dim light. ‘But the future is bright. I have brains. I have luck. I have the blessing of the Gods, for what that may be worth. And I glory in the friends I seem to make everywhere.

  ‘You, of course, are the latest.’

  I looked at the inscription. Lucius seemed greatly proud of it. But it was clearly a wretched thing. The letters were of uneven height. The word form ‘sumptu’ – from ‘sumptus’, meaning ‘expense’ – was misspelled as ‘sumpu’, though might this not be an indication to actual pronunciation in the past? I wondered vaguely at the time. So the money had still been there for this Basilius: there was, even so, a decline in the things on which it could be spent.

  We moved on, and Lucius told me about his rejection of the Faith. It had happened when he was fifteen. He’d spent a summer on the family estates in Sicily. Some villagers there still worshipped as their ancestors had since time immemorial.

  ‘I looked at this sweet communion with the natural world. I looked at the ghastly worship of body parts and the meaningless words of the Credo. What more could I do but embrace the Truth?’ he asked.

  We stood together by a little iron gate that led down to the lower chambers. We looked across the arena. The moon was setting. The coals were dying down. The priest and his assistants were clearing away the remains of the sacrifice. The eastern sky would soon be fringed with pink.

  ‘What are you doing for dinner tomorrow?’ Lucius asked as we prepared to leave. ‘I did, after all, intend to have you to myself then.’

  I said that was for Maximin to decide, but I’d do my best. I liked Lucius. He might be as superstitious in his own way as the priests he despised. His superstition might be a failed one. But he was an engaging companion. And – I’ll confess – I was flattered to be treated as an equal by the closest I’d ever seen to the noble Romans of old.

  I, you must always bear in mind, was also of noble blood. Ethelbert might have taken the lands. We might have fallen on hard times. But the blood was still there. No one could take that from us.

  So Lucius and I were equals. But it was nice to be treated as an equal.

  16

  ‘We haven’t been in Rome two days,’ Maximin shouted, ‘and already you’re out all night – drinking, whoring and gambling, I’ve no doubt.’

  He was angry. No, he was furious. I hadn’t seen him so lose control before. His face was red. His hands shook. He walked restlessly up and down in my public room. Martin sat quietly, looking at the wall. He looked embarrassed – yet also still frightened.

  ‘I haven’t made a big point of this – though it’s in my full report – but you came here to seek penance for your existing sins, not to commit fresh ones.’ He went to a detailed recitation of what I’d been up to in Canterbury. Martin heard it all.

  I tried to explain that I’d been in perfectly safe company. But I couldn’t think of anything convincing to say that wasn’t other than an admission of what he’d accused me of doing, or a confession of truth that might kill him from shock.

  He calmed down a little. ‘Listen, my son, you may think I want you to live like a monk. I don’t. But I must warn you – Rome is a dangerous city. You know we’re being followed everywhere. You know our rooms have been searched. Don’t you ask yourself why?’ He didn’t pause for an answer, but continued, ‘There are things here that you can’t begin to understand – wickedness upon wickedness upon wickedness. It is the home of our Holy Mother Church. Before then, it was the home of all vileness and sin, and this is with it still. Rome is evil. Rome is dangerous. I want us out of here in the time given by the prefect. Between now and then, I don’t want you to go out alone.’

  I tried to tell him about my walk though the city with Lucius, and how safe we’d been. Maximin wasn’t interested.

  ‘The dangers of which I speak are not to be repelled by a few armed slaves. There are evils outside this house that will swallow you whole. I don’t want you ever to go out alone at night again. You go with me. You go with Martin. Or you stay in this house.’

  The lecture was over. Maximin went back to his big speech. I slunk off to bed, wondering what he could have meant by his ‘full report’ – hadn’t he given that the day before? How many of these meetings were there to be?

  Martin had disappeared. Slaves can always make themselves scarce when they need to. Gretel was nowhere to be seen. In any event, I was shattered. I’d felt quite full of myself as I threw stones over the outer gate of the house to get the attention of Marcella’s watchman. I’d felt good groping my way upstairs. Then I’d tripped over Maximin’s boots, put out for cleaning, and his door had flown open. Now, all I wanted was to get some sleep. I pulled up the bedclothes, barely noticing how some smell of Gretel still clung to them.

  When I woke, the sun was pouring into the room. No one had disturbed me, and I’d lost much of the morning. Previous lack of sleep and a bellyful of wine had given me a ferocious headache. I looked out into the corr
idor and stopped a slave. Soon, a couple of them were carrying water up for a bath.

  I eased myself into the cold water. It did seem colder than at Richborough. But cleanliness has a price that must usually be paid. After a while, I got used to the chill, and sat there scrubbing myself. And I began to feel more human. I started to think of Edwina – not the Edwina of untutored passion, but an Edwina who knew all the wicked things Gretel had introduced me to the night before last. That really perked me up.

  Better still, as I was drying myself, there was a knock at the door. The tailors had finished some of the clothes I had ordered. Some things still needed a few touches to be perfect. But the suit of blue I’d ordered fitted exactly. It was in the mixed Roman and barbarian style then the fashion in Italy – both trousers and tunic. I’d specified it should follow the shape of my body without being tight.

  The tailors had done an excellent job. I looked down at my reflection in the bath water and loved what I saw.

  I went downstairs and showed myself to Marcella and the slaves. They agreed. I saw Gretel’s mouth fall open with wonder and with lust. That night, I’d not disappoint either of us, I told myself. Marcella was so pleased she had me go out into the street to show off to the neighbours and passers-by what manner of guests she was able to attract. Sure enough, every head turned as I walked up and down in the hot Roman sun. This was our first hot day in Italy. Until then, the days had been like the best days of a Kentish summer. Now the sun burned with a wondrously pleasing heat.