B007IIXYQY EBOK (36 page)

“Lycas!” he called out softly into the vile blackness of a small square cell into which twenty or more prisoners were packed, leaving no room to sit. The stench of offal brought him close to nausea. He spoke into a living crypt, full of muffled crying, moans and whispered prayers. “Lycas, speak if you are here!”

After a time a hand groped through the bars and strongly seized his own.

“Young man,” came a familiar, irritating voice.

“Isodorus, it is you.”

“Young man, your old companion is dead.”

“No,” he whispered. “Do not tell me this!” At first Marcus felt nothing; Isodorus’ words were empty of meaning. Then slowly a dull heavy coldness crept over him; it seemed the stiffness of death claimed him limb by limb. Then he knew it fully, and he was seized with a furious grief too great for tears; it called for gnashing of teeth and flinging oneself to the earth. He sank against the bars and remained for long moments in stricken stillness.

Companion of my whole life, Endymion’s true father, you cannot have left me.
How can I live without the interference of those grumbled opinions, those sour objections, that sturdy love that weathered everything? It is like losing the horizon line. It is like losing…the house of your birth.

I killed him. I could have prevented him from following me.

“How?” Marcus managed at last. “Which one of those jackals killed him?”

“None of them and all of them,” Isodorus replied. “He was not strong enough for such rough treatment. He lies dead in here somewhere; he just quietly slipped off from us. Rejoice—it is a blessing. It is a far better death than that which comes tomorrow.”

Marcus felt his whole soul collapse into blackness. “I swear by all that is sacred he who has done this will suffer.”

“If you mean Nero, his suffering is assured. As for your old friend, his life was complete; he lived out his time. You must not take death so seriously—it happens all the time. Now, look at me.” Isodorus reached a bony hand through the bars and turned Marcus’ face toward the feeble light of the torch in the hand of the jailer stationed at the door.
“I know you.
Tell me, was it not once prophesied of you that the fate of the whole country would rest in your hands?”

Marcus was startled out of his misery. Other than his father, who was in distant Germania, all who knew of that prophecy were dead.

“How do you know of such things?”

“I know them. Look to yourself and stay alive. The ancient days stir in you.” Isodorus leaned closer; his words were half sung like some baleful lay. “You are of the time of Saturn, not of our times, and you are the bane of rulers. Your destiny is back of the North Wind. Your god is Dionysus, bearer of freedom.” Then he said, casually as he might have asked for a bite of an apple, “Will you look after my pupils?”

“Your pupils?” Marcus could scarcely believe Isodorus meant to honor him by entrusting his followers to his care. “I would gladly, but—”

“About thirty of them live on in hiding. They need someone to shelter them and encourage them and keep them from harm.”

“But…I was not one of your followers. I am a man who does not yet know what he believes.”

“Of no importance. The temper and mettle of the man is more important than precisely
what
he believes. They do not know what they believe either.” He worked a ring free from his finger. “Already, though you know it not, you have passed from the life of one who is sheltered to that of one who shelters. Take this ring so they will know it is my will.”

“One day I’ll either curse you or praise you for this.” Marcus then took an ivory-handled dagger from his clothes and pressed it into Isodorus’ hand. At first the philosopher pushed it away.

“Take it,” Marcus insisted. “It’s a better death than the dogs.”

Finally, with a measure of indifference, Isodorus complied. “You do not understand death,” he said, “but I bless you for your kindness anyway.”

On the following day at dawn Nero ordered all copies of Isodorus’ works seized from the bookstalls and libraries and even had private mansions searched. Then his writings were burned in the Old Forum. At the second hour, when the games commenced, the young nobles of the equestrian and senatorial classes were seated alongside the imperial box so that Nero could view their response to the bloody lesson he gave them; they would learn the fate of those wretches who tried to lead youth astray.

When the huddled victims were dragged out, Marcus saw to his dismay that Isodorus had not used the dagger—though evidently half the captives in the cell with him had, to the great frustration of the guards who discovered their corpses at dawn. Isodorus was naked but for a loincloth, his hands bound behind his back. Marcus made himself watch; not to do so seemed a sort of abandonment. An animal handler, whip in hand, raised a grate and out sprang ten half-starved Molossian dogs.

The image of it never left Marcus’ mind: Isodorus so white and thin, the horror and confusion of dogs, the blur of fur, the bloody foam in their mouths, the whiplike motions of their bodies as they swarmed over the frail philosopher.

The next day Marcus recovered Lycas’ body from the open pit outside the city where unclaimed dead were taken, and arranged a costly funeral; he insisted Lycas be dressed in finery and carried through the streets on a gilded couch with a full procession of mourners. Then he had Lycas’ ashes put in the grand family tomb a half mile from the city along the Via Appia. This deeply embarrassed his father, his aunt Arria, and the greater family—it looked absurd, they protested, to lavish so much honor on a former slave.

But as he watched his lifelong companion’s body burn, the sturdy Endymion-soul resurrected itself as it always seemed to when given time enough.
I did not kill Lycas. Blind bestial tyranny killed him.
Tyranny wears a multitude of masks; the mask it wears now is Nero. Tomorrow it will wear another.

And so it was in Lycas’ name that he committed the act of rebellion that established his notoriety for all time—and brought about his father’s fall.

He owned one book of Isodorus’ writings that escaped the purge. He engaged copyists to reproduce it, then employed Isodorus’s students, along with his father’s poorer clients, in secretly distributing the copies to the owners of the bookstalls, who wanted them in spite of the danger because the persecution excited the people’s interest in Isodorus’ sayings. And so he resurrected Isodorus in the only way he knew. Soon after, a copy of one of the works of the banned poet Lucan came into his hands. This, too, he had copied and distributed.
“Your god is Dionysus, bearer of freedom.”
Isodorus’ words sounded in his mind in ghostly affirmation. Within a short time he had brought a half-dozen damned poets and philosophers back to life. The steady influx of illicit works into the bookstalls baffled and enraged the five Imperial Advisors, who strove constantly to trace the source.

When Diocles wrote to the elder Julianus that he had seen and heard things that caused him to suspect the younger Marcus was the notorious producer and distributor of banned books, the old man could bear his son’s indiscretions no longer; against orders, he started for home. His timing was to prove fatal.

In these times, conspiracy followed conspiracy, each more ruthlessly put down than the last—Nero had ruled through murder for too long. The Emperor realized in his more lucid moments that he was trailed by wolves, and as instinct warned him they crowded ever closer, he responded in the only way he knew: by planning more murders, on a broader and more efficient scale. When Nero eventually came to believe that all the northern legionary commanders posted in Germania and Gaul, Marcus’ father among them, conspired to turn their legions against him and put one of their number on the throne, the Emperor ordered them home with the intent of staging a mass trial and sending them together to their doom. But in an unprecedented act of collective defiance, they refused to obey.

Old Julianus, however, had already journeyed half the distance and had no intention of turning back—he meant to bridle his errant son, and he half believed his innocence would somehow shield him.

Marcus realized, alarmed, Nero would have only his father upon whom to vent his wrath.

Julianus the Elder was in such a weakened condition the journey home took four months; it was midwinter, past the time of the Feast of Saturnalia, before he returned to the great-house on the Esquiline. He had to be carried into the house in a litter, so ill was he from a malaise ascribed by his physicians to the noxious vapors of the boglands of the north.

Marcus scarcely knew this man with his bleak stare, the flesh of his face loosened from the bone. Anger had burnt itself out in the old man’s eyes; they were a place of ashes. That very morning he was notified he was charged with treason; his trial on charges of “criminal ingratitude, treasonable impiety to the genius of our lord, and conspiracy to seize the throne” was to commence on the third day after the Kalends of
Februarius,
a
bare month away. As Julianus was carried through the gardens, Marcus stayed beside him, attentive and close.

His father was momentarily shocked from his misery at the sight of his household. The house was no longer his own: It reflected wholly the mind of his son.

It had become more school then residence: Everywhere teachers and philosophers of various schools mingled familiarly with students. They paced the colonnades with bowed heads, narrowly missing colliding with one another, eyes vacant with thought, then sharp as they pressed home some argument, or they sat by garden fountains, listening to lectures or bent over esoteric texts. They were of every class, of both sexes. Some, Julianus saw with disbelief, were his own household slaves. Next to the great dolphin fountain, which was stilled, and overgrown with scum—his negligent son, he saw, had not bothered to have the servants clean and repair it—he recognized the woman Theophila, the greatest living authority of Epicureanism, thoughtfully sipping his wine with an amiable, aged historian who was supposed to be in exile. As Julianus was carried past the library, the old man saw it had flooded its boundaries and invaded four adjacent rooms; avalanches of bookrolls spilled out of the wall niches and buried the reading couches. His son, it seemed, had acquired no possessions in his absence other than books. This was the abode of a man who found the material world an intrusion.

“This is not my house!” he said gruffly to Marcus as the litterbearers set him down on a hard bed in the gloom of his starkly bare sleeping chamber. “It is a public square! So this is what happens when I am not about. I trust they are not living off alms.”

Moving more swiftly than the servants, Marcus covered his father with a woolen blanket against the chill. “A certain few
have
needed my assistance, though I would hardly call it alms,” he replied, “but if I thought it would give you one hour less of misery, I would send all of them away at once.”

Julianus heard the succession of emotions in his son’s voice: sadness, resignation, and the bearing up; a voice so solemn and sure, so possessed of—what?—a well-tempered strength joined to innocence, born not of inexperience but of an excess of living, a pain that drags a man close to death yet leaves him alive. And he truly looked at his son for the first time.

Marcus had grown taller than his father, and despite the reflective intellect apparent in those eyes, Julianus had little trouble imagining him fighting the fierce nomadic tribesmen in the deserts of Numidia; a scar from a sword cut perilously near the throat showed how nearly he had been killed. Diocles, he realized, had not written him of this. He sensed in his son’s manner an ability to assume rulership in any circumstance without being overbearing, a natural part he probably assumed without knowing.
It is a pity he will not long survive me—he might have made a fine governor in my place.

“I am sorry,” Marcus went on tentatively, not sure what his father was thinking. “I mean to stay on even terms with you—we have not much time left to us.”

“I saw Diocles give you a document.” The old man’s tone was still unyielding. As always, Marcus thought sadly, he keeps me roughly at a distance.

“More
foul business,” Marcus said. “A love note from Veiento.” Veiento was the most feared of Nero’s senatorial advisors, a ruthless minister who encouraged common informers with rich money gifts. “It seems your trial’s to be held in secret, with five of the Imperial Advisors as judges.” To Marcus this was the final disaster, to have his father’s life snuffed out in some hidden chamber where he could rouse no one’s ire, raise no public sympathy for his plight. “Veiento writes on: ‘I am not completely unfeeling—your execution will be public, if not your trial.’”

Julianus said nothing, his gaze fixed as a hawk’s.

“I mean to fight this, Father. Veiento must have some evil secret he does not want aired in an open trial before the Senate. I mean to discover what it is and lay it out before Nero.”

“To no purpose! That smooth-tongued eel has sole possession of the imperial ear—all you say will be turned round against us.” The ferocity of his father’s sullen resignation began to rouse uneasiness in Marcus. Old Julianus looked at him. “Veiento sent a message round just to gloat over that?”