Conspiracies of Rome Page 18

  ‘Do you know, he helped stop my father’s legal challenge to the will that left everything to the Church? He was only a deacon back then. Even so, he was in thick with Pope Gregory. If beggaring his own family helped advance him in the corpse cult of the Galileans, he didn’t care shit.’

  Suddenly: ‘Did you miss something? Would you have me speak louder?’ Lucius wheeled round and spat the questions at the priest who’d let us in. He’d been following us round the temple.

  ‘My lord Basilius,’ the priest answered, looking panicky, ‘you speak too freely in this house of God.’

  ‘Well, you can speak freely too – that is, if you want a stick taken to your back one night. Fuck off back to your work, scum, and stop snooping on your betters. Do you hear me?’

  The priest walked away with a stiff dignity. The dispensator would have this on this desk well before breakfast, I had no doubt. But Lucius seemed untouchable. Perhaps I was too, if I kept in with him, but my own mouth shut. Just to make sure, though, that something acceptable got back, I turned and ostentatiously crossed myself as we left.

  25

  Lucius had his house not far away from the temple. I say house, but it was in fact a little palace – and mostly in good condition, once you got past the shabby brick exterior. We passed into a high, wide entrance hall, faced with marble that glowed a gentle pink in the fading light that came from above. In the centre was a fountain that still splashed water over a statue of a naked boy.

  A slave bowed low to Lucius and removed a cloth from a little block that I gathered was an altar to the household gods. Lucius took up a gold crucifix that had been placed on the cloth and spat on it, holding it upside down. As the slave took the thing away, Lucius prayed silently and scattered a few petals on the altar. ‘I feel cleansed from that,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Let’s eat.’

  Dinner was plain but good – bread, olives, a little baked rabbit, and plenty of wine mixed with clean water. We didn’t recline in the pompous manner of old, but sat opposite each other at a small table. Slaves stood behind to refill our cups.

  I stuffed myself and drank until I saw two lamp flames where only one had been. I began to feel better than I had all day. Drugged cakes are all very well. But nothing beats good food and plenty of wine.

  For a while, we discussed the arrangements for the following morning. We reviewed the progress of the day, and planned our course of further questioning.

  ‘Remember,’ said Lucius again, ‘you keep digging until the truth is exposed. We shall see what we unearth tomorrow.’

  I said I’d get Martin to lay in a supply of papyrus for our notes.

  We turned to other matters. I wanted to know more about Lucius, and I wanted to know something about Constantinople. ‘Tell me,’ I asked, struggling with the words – the drink was catching up fast on me – ‘about Constantinople. Is it really as grand as people say?’

  Lucius put his cup down. ‘Compared with Rome,’ he said, ‘it always used to be decidedly second best. Constantine had the place built in a hurry when he needed a new capital in the East. For the next few hundred years, his buildings kept falling down. Nowadays, though, it has no competition. And it is pretty good, if you can put up with all those dreadful churches. The buildings are huge and still fresh. The place has at least a million people. The nobility is rich. The baths are crowded. The shops have everything you could ever want. It costs the earth to live there, of course. Oh yes, and the emperor’s a complete bastard.’

  Lucius had my cup refilled, this time with unmixed wine. I asked him about Phocas. ‘The Church here in Rome liked him. Was he really that bad?’

  ‘Yes, he is that bad,’ Lucius insisted. He elaborated on what he’d said the other evening. Phocas was the most common emperor there had ever been. Lucius was as scandalised by this as by the man’s great personal ugliness. He’d been a lowly officer in the army on the Danube. The previous emperor, Maurice, had been unlucky in his wars on the frontier, and had put up taxes. The army had eventually revolted and put up Phocas as emperor. Maurice had found no support at home, and was soon put out of the way. This was the first successful revolution against a legitimate emperor in hundreds of years. The Christian ascendancy had until then stabilised the succession.

  Phocas, though, had turned out to be a complete incompetent. The barbarians had overrun the Danube provinces, getting all the way to Athens. Then the Persians had put up an alleged son of Maurice as the legitimate emperor and invaded. For a while, they’d kept up the pretence of keeping an old agreement with Maurice. Now, they’d dropped that and were talking about a permanent conquest of the provinces west of the Euphrates.

  As Lucius had said, all this left Phocas in serious trouble. There were no taxes coming in from the East. There was nothing to be got in Italy – not even though he’d restored Smaragdus as exarch, who’d previously been recalled for madness and oppression.

  The exarch of Africa had effectively declared independence and was plotting an invasion. The whole Empire was collapsing around Phocas. He was too useless to lift a finger in defence of the Empire, but kept control in the capital with a reign of terror. That was how Lucius had lost his expectancy from his Eastern relative.

  ‘Put to death for plotting, the swine claimed,’ he said. ‘More like he just wanted the cash.’

  I described my similar experiences with Ethelbert back home.

  Lucius raised his cup. ‘So we have still more in common – both robbed of our birthright by tyrants adored by these slimy clerics in Rome. May they all rot in the underworld.’

  He drained his cup. More was added.

  ‘But if the man is so dangerous, what could you have been thinking to go there?’ I asked.

  ‘Simple.’ Lucius gave one of his charming smiles. ‘I hoped I could charm the deformed pile of shit into giving me back some of the confiscated property. I got some inspired piece of flattery written in Greek and went out there to read it to him in person. You won’t believe how I sat in the ship practising the words until it sounded as if I really knew the language.

  ‘Then I got to Constantinople and found he could just about follow the prayers in Greek. His only fluency is in a kind of barbarised Latin. Still, I recited my poem, and it was interpreted a couplet at a time for him. I didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand it. But we both went through the motions. He grinned. He hugged me. He sent me off with a letter of commendation to Boniface and the promise of a consulship – just as soon as he could get round to reviving the office.

  ‘I suppose I should count myself lucky to leave his palace with the head still on my shoulders. There were more executions that day in the Circus. He even had the women and children put down. I was there to see it.’

  We sat awhile in silence. For all the horrors Lucius was describing, and for all that were attending me even now, I was feeling oddly comfortable. I was no longer alone, and no longer frightened of being alone. I had a friend – a friend who would surely see me right with Maximin, and perhaps much else besides.

  A slave fussed with one of the lamp wicks. Lucius sat up straight. ‘But I’m not much of a host. Let me show you the great domus Basilii. Parts of it are still worth a look.’

  Parts of it were indeed worth a look. None of it had fallen down. The roofs were still sound. The living quarters were simply arranged now, the grander furniture having long since been sold off. But the pieces that remained were nicely matched. The floors were covered with rich mosaics of scenes from the ancient mythology. Though tatty in places and often faded, the plastered walls still had their original paintings – country scenes, hunts, and some very interesting scenes of city life from a Rome not yet fallen into decay.

  There wasn’t much of a library. What books I saw were mostly full of nonsense – magical spells and the like – from the Old Religion. Possession of these, Lucius carefully explained, was treason in itself. His whole life, he added, was a gigantic and deliberate crime against the modern world. He looked into my face as I sca
nned one of the pages – it was an incantation against haemorrhoids. How could someone be so rational in some matters, yet so ridiculously superstitious in others?

  ‘Do you believe in anything?’ he asked, taking up the question he’d earlier dropped. ‘Better an atheist, I suppose, than a Christian. But while I’ve heard of them, I’ve never met an atheist. Tell me, Alaric, what are your beliefs?’

  ‘Until yesterday,’ I answered, ‘I didn’t know how a book was made. Do you blame me if I keep an open mind about how many gods, if any, there may be watching over us?’

  Lucius had been honest with me. Why should I not be honest with him?

  ‘How old are you, Alaric?’ he asked.

  ‘Eighteen.’ I suddenly remembered: ‘I shall be nineteen come Sunday.’

  ‘Then we must celebrate. But so young and an atheist! I’m sure you get on well with Uncle Anicius. Don’t you have any sense of a higher power that directs the world? Even the God of the Galileans exists – though he isn’t the Supreme Being the priests say he is. There is a providence in our lives, you know. One day, you will have a sign, just as I did.’

  He paused and began a new line of questioning. ‘Tell me again, my dearest and golden Alaric, do you believe that laws must always be obeyed?’

  A year later, and I’d have stiffened and begun looking round for where spies might be hiding. But I’d grown up in a world where power, if often arbitrary, didn’t rely on informers. Besides, I had no reason to distrust Lucius.

  ‘The natural function of law,’ I said, trying not to slur my speech too much, ‘is to protect life and property. We are therefore obliged to obey the laws of any ruler – whoever he is and by whatever right he rules – that reasonably tend to this object. Any laws that go beyond this don’t bind in conscience. Perhaps they should be obeyed in public for the avoidance of scandal. But they should not stop us in private from doing whatever we please.’

  Lucius asked if that included laws prompted by the teachings of the Church.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I’d have gone on, but my head was beginning to spin from all the wine, and I could feel myself on the verge of incoherence.

  I suppose, my Dear Reader, you will put my blasphemous rejection of what our Most Holy Faith enjoins on both rulers and ruled to my infatuation with Epicurus. Well, Epicurus does say all this and more. But I still hadn’t done more than guess that this was his position.

  Oddly enough, I’d had all this drawn to my attention by a priest in Canterbury, who’d got me to read an attack on the old British heretic Pelagius. The ignorant churls we were trying to evangelise had never thought about Divine Grace and how to reconcile this with freedom of the will. They’d thought no more of that than they had about the Divine Nature of Christ. But there was a slight fear among the missionaries that the independent views of the Romanised Britons we’d displaced might somehow have infected my own people.

  We moved out of the library, and now stood by a functioning bathhouse. The sudden chill did me good. I let the subject drop.

  ‘I can’t always justify the full thing,’ Lucius explained as he took me though the complex of steam rooms and hot and cold pools. ‘But there’s still unlimited water from the local aqueduct, and I can manage a hot tub in the morning. There’s a broken tenement down the road. You must come round one morning when I’ve had the slaves rip some more of the joists out of it to get the boiler up to full pressure. You’ll be amazed how glorious the experience can be.

  ‘Then there’s the gymnasium. I have a small one inside. But the days are warm enough now to use the larger one outside. You’re young enough and active enough to have a natural poise. But you won’t believe how much art can add to nature – or how it can extend the effects of nature.’

  I accepted the invitation, suggesting I should come back the day after next. This was a Saturday. We eventually agreed the day after that. There would surely be time on Sunday for recreation.

  ‘And here is my bedroom.’ He led into a high chamber, its walls faced with marble and painted plaster. I looked with surprise at the frankness of the painted scenes. In the middle of the room was a large bed of ebony heavily trimmed with ivory. It was neatly turned back, revealing the clean silken sheets. A few feet from it stood a small brazier to keep the night chill from the room.

  Lucius stood proudly by the bed. ‘There is another of these in the next room. We once had more. My ancestors had them specially imported from Alexandria.

  ‘Would you like to have a bed made up for you next door?’ he asked. ‘It’s a way back to the Caelian, and I won’t say how exhausted you’re beginning to look. Indeed, why not move in as my guest? There’s plenty of room here. I know we’ll get on very well together.’

  A thought was stirring in my fuddled mind. ‘Lucius,’ I replied, ‘I’m really grateful for the invite. But I should be getting back to my lodgings. I need to be up and about there very early.’

  I saw his face drop a little.

  ‘As for moving in as your guest,’ I added, ‘I’ll give that strong consideration tomorrow. On the one hand, I feel drawn back there because of Maximin. And there may be evidence to be uncovered that I’ll only find by staying there. On the other, I do appreciate I may bring greater detachment to the investigation if I’m away from those direct memories.’

  Lucius forced a cloak on me against the night air, and then watched me as I vanished into the blackness. His slaves had me back in no time at Marcella’s.

  Gretel was up late in the entrance hall, making a good pretence of folding some linen. I was tired. But I was young and fighting sorrow. And the walk back to the Caelian had stirred up that mix of wine and drugs to give me an interestingly endless energy.

  26

  It was turning out useful for Maximin to be all but a declared saint. Even without the immense pleasure of having Lucius as a guest – even without the gross flattery he sprayed at her in a steady stream – Marcella would have been inclined to give us whatever we wanted.

  It was Friday morning, and we had assembled all the guests and household in the entrance hall. They sat facing us. Martin, conveniently returned from the dispensator – he wouldn’t say what his mission had been – sat to our left at a writing desk to take a verbatim note of the meeting.

  ‘We need,’ said Lucius, opening in his smoothest voice, ‘so far as possible to reconstruct the last day on earth of our former Brother in Christ, now Holy Saint Maximin. To this end, we have, our Gracious Lady Hostess kindly permitting,’ Marcella almost purred from her raised chair at the front of the household, opposite Martin, ‘brought you all together so that you can share any and all knowledge you may have of that sad yet glorious day. Our Gracious Noble Hostess has agreed to overlook any default that the slaves may confess to in giving up such knowledge. Our only concern is to apprehend those enemies of God and man who have committed this act of impiety. Let us therefore begin.’

  I rose and addressed the gathering. ‘We need to know everything that Saint Maximin did and said on his last day with us. In particular, we know that he received a number of messages throughout the day. We need to know when these came, and who brought them, and – if possible – what they said. We shall be most grateful for any information you can share with us.’

  I had thought that getting everyone together like this would be a mistake. Better, I’d said to Lucius, to have people in to a side room one at a time. ‘No,’ he’d said. Including slaves, there were over thirty people in that house. To question them all would take an age. Besides, what evidence they had might be corrected or supplemented by others if they could also hear it. Even so, I still thought a public enquiry might not reveal very much.

  I was wrong. The words were no sooner out of my mouth than the old watchman was on his feet.

  ‘It’s my job to see all who come and go in this house,’ he said, ‘and I remember everything that happened that day.’ He looked around to ensure he had full attention, cleared his throat importantly, and continued. ‘Shortly after
the young sir had gone to his bed, a little boy came to the door. He had a message for the Holy Saint. I said I’d take the message myself. But he said it was private. He’d been told to give the message into the hands of the Saint directly. So I let him through.’

  ‘Who took him up to Maxi . . . to the Saint’s rooms?’ I asked.

  There was a pause, and then Gretel was on her feet. ‘I took him up,’ she said. Unfortunately, she hadn’t gone into Maximin’s rooms. She’d only seen that he was writing at his desk. He’d got up and closed the door as the boy entered. The boy had been there a very short while, and then had come out with a papyrus note.

  ‘Would you recognise the boy,’ I asked the old watchman, ‘if you ever saw him again?’

  ‘Of course, sir. I never forget a face.’ To Marcella: ‘That’s right, isn’t it, my lady?’ He gave a description that might have fitted every child in Rome above the lowest, unhealthiest class.

  Martin’s pen scratched away as various slaves began to murmur agreement, commenting on the old watchman’s excellent memory for names and faces.

  I held up my hand for silence. ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘that was the first visit. Can anyone add to what we have heard? Did anyone else see the child? Does anyone else perhaps know who the child was?’

  No real answers here. Others had seen the boy as he was led through the house, but had nothing to add to what we already knew.

  The next visitor Maximin had received was the monk Ambrose – the one, that is, who’d been found dead the previous day. He’d come with an oral message. There was no need to ask what he’d said. I’d been with Maximin and had heard the summons.