Boy Caesar (13 page)

He continued chanting until the rite was through and his head felt spacy. Sacrificial sheep and cattle were to be killed at dawn as an offering to Elagabal before the procession began. He was keyed up at the prospect of leading the extravaganza and of being in the spotlight before the crowds. The exhibitionist in him was planning to excel as never before. His costume was already arranged, and the streets were to be sanded with gold dust.

Back at the palace he remained impatient for Hierocles to arrive. Unlike the selfless passage of time in the temple, the hours now seemed to have got stuck together. The waiting was interminable. He could find nothing to take his mind off Hierocles, except a visit to the kitchens to assist with the preparation of dinner. He had requested that the food should be colour-coded bright blue and that the various courses should be themed around this colour. Everything from the canapés to the vegetables to the multi-decked desserts were to be dyed a uniform shade of blue.

He enjoyed introducing an element of camp into the kitchen and having the chefs sing along with him in choral falsetto. Not that they needed much encouragement in their predominantly feminine pursuits. They were also responsible for preparing speciality dishes for his animals. He fed goose liver to his dogs, grapes from Apamea to his horses, parrots and pheasants to his leopards. The whole staff would sing the refrain ‘Big cat, fat cat, boss cat, rank cat, alley cat’, adding a castrad flourish to the signature.

He added spices to the sauce as it simmered in a pan. He felt completely at home in the kitchen and was accepted by the staff as one of them.

Satisfied by what he had tasted, he left them to it and went back to his quarters. To his amazement he found Hierocles waiting. He
had arrived early and was sitting on a couch drinking wine. Again he noticed the butchness about this youth, the rough-diamond quality of somebody used to living by their wits. Enamoured as he was, he felt instinctually wary of the streetwise manner written all over Hierocles’ expression. He didn’t seem at all nervous about being in Caesar’s apartment or in the least apologetic that he had arrived early.

Heliogabalus put his thoughts briefly through a search engine but was quickly won over by the youth’s looks. He noticed a prominent scar above Hierocles’ lip and wondered if it had come from a fight. He imagined him getting beaten in some alley brawl down on the docks.

He didn’t hesitate. He walked over to Hierocles and kissed him full on the mouth, only to find the lips wouldn’t let him go but drew him into an aching vortex. The response was so charged that he felt shaken. When he pulled away he felt his senses had been stretched across a line.

He needed a drink and badly. He knew it was all crazy and that what he was doing would earn him the animosity of the people. His impulses were so ballistic that he was almost flying. He could feel his emotions on collision course and his hormones creating overdrive in his shook-up system. He made no attempt to disengage from Hierocles, even when servants carrying dishes came into the room. He didn’t care if they gossiped. They would have to get used to the fact that he was uncompromisingly gay.

Hierocles was suspicious of the food at first and couldn’t understand why it was dyed blue. The grilled mullet was not to his taste, nor were any of the culinary embellishments designed to please the eye. He appeared interested only in the wines and drank with the self-destructive pace of someone out to blind himself. Heliogabalus couldn’t keep up. He was starting to lose his grip on the conversation and to hear a stranger talking in his place. Hierocles was trying to tell him that he had worked in the theatre and the circus and that he had driven cars on the race track. The whole thing had started to take on a montage effect, with no clear boundaries being observed.

They began kissing again, before entering a hot bath prepared for the purpose of aiding the digestion. They rumbled in together, legs kicking like frogs, arms working like flippers to secure a hold on the marble rim. The heat had them instandy erect, but Heliogabalus was determined to hold back. He didn’t want to treat Hierocles like rent and so repeat a common pattern in the youth’s life. By resisting he hoped to show him that he thought more of him than his previous lovers.

He must have passed out at some stage, for when he came to Antony was standing over him, and he found himself not in the bathroom but laid out on his bed. The morning light was streaming through the window in a blond halo of impacted photons. It seemed only seconds ago that he had been lying in the bath, and he couldn’t account for the block of time that had gone missing.

‘I rescued you last night,’ Antony smiled. ‘You blacked out in the bath. I sent Hierocles home and put you to bed. You probably don’t remember anything.’

‘Nothing,’ Heliogabalus said, feeling the dent in his heart at mention of Hierocles’ name.

‘He’ll be back, don’t worry. He’s left you his details.’

Heliogabalus sat bolt upright at the realization that it was his day. The fog had lifted above the city and light transmitted by millennia of burnt-out stars hurried into the room. He felt the catch of excitement in his stomach, knowing his whole life had prepared him for the events to come. His head was amazingly clear, given what he had drunk last night.

He sat up and the light hit him direct. He was out of bed immediately, while Antony prepared his clothes and breakfast. Today the ritual took on special significance, and there was no holding him back as he went out to the terrace naked and saluted the sun. It was red and blue and orange behind his eyes, the molecular components of light busying their way into his consciousness.

Back inside he dressed in the clothes applicable to his priesthood. He wore a long gold and mauve tunic and had his hair styled like Nero. When the procession crossed the city he wanted the
crowds to assume he was the reincarnation of an emperor who had written his name in fire on the night sky.

He had his schedule carefully planned. He was to meet the musicians at ten o’clock, attend the sacrifices and take it from there. The prefect of police had orders to give the procession maximum back-up, and there was to be a massive fireworks display over the river later that night.

He went inside to have an assistant fix his makeup. He knew that Hierocles would be in the crowd, and half his pleasure came from this thought. Already he could hear an insistent heart-beat drum establishing a rhythm for the march as it alerted the city to its beat.

Summer had broken over Rome like gold highlights. His mother, who was to play a prominent part in the day’s events, came and spoke to him about her place in the procession. She had a new lover, this time an Eastern woman called Natasha, and wasn’t sure about being seen with her at the festival. Natasha hung on her arm with all the fizz of a new flavour. Together they looked like women evaluating their lives through each other, pitching their past experience with men against the benefits of the relationship they had discovered.

Accepting Antony’s council, he advised them not to provoke the crowds by openly displaying their affection in public. It was important to him that the day should be treated as a religious occasion and that the crowds should respect his god.

He had himself driven over to the Palatine Hill to meet up with the extravaganza’s start. Six white horses had been groomed for the occasion and were already hitched to the chariot on which the black stone was placed. His own cult were largely assembled and ready to march. They were mostly carrying flowers and were in the mood to get blissed out on drugs and the music. The beat was already stitched inside them as noise in their heads. Some had begun to dance on the temple steps in the sexually explicit way of youth.

He had a word with the leader of the Praetorian Guard, and was assured of their protection. The disdainful way in which the man addressed him, hardly bothering to suppress his contempt for the activities, gave Heliogabalus an indication of just how unpopular he
was with the Army. The man had the leathery features of a seasoned campaigner and the outright machismo of a thug. His hands were large and weathered like his face and looked like they could crack a wooden beam. He smelled of drink and something raw like turpentine. He was used to butchering men across continents, trampling natives into the marshes, pursuing the enemy through rolling dust-clouds, but clearly none of this was as objectionable as taking orders from a made-up emperor. The man stamped back to his guard, dismissively leaving Heliogabalus to take up with his own.

He spoke to the musicians and the priests who were to take leading roles in the march. The sky was seamless except for a few clouds drifting like floaters across vision. He saw the clearness of the day as a sign after the weeks of summer rain. It was all part of the exhilarating atmosphere created by his god.

They set off at ten o’clock across the network of straight roads blasted through Rome and continuing out to the suburbs. At first he was aware of his vulnerability, but after a time his self-consciousness disappeared and he entered so fully into the music that he became the rhythm.

His band were playing primitive beats with rattles, castanets, maracas and drums. The expression communicated to his head, heart and groin. People were throwing flowers at him, and again, as when he first entered Rome, he stopped to pick up the best and acknowledge the well-wisher. Half-way across town he began to feel exhausted, but he leaned on the music to help keep him going. He could feel his individuality breaking down and morphing into the collective. The dance had got under his skin and he was suddenly hundreds rather than one, the city rather than the street, the god rather than himself. He was stoned on noise and excitement. Somebody threw a stone against the chariot and it struck a wheel. This was followed by a succession of missiles aimed at himself and the fetish he worshipped. There was a brief skirmish in the crowd, and a number of dissidents were dragged off by his bodyguards. He didn’t lose step for a moment but continued backwards on the points of his toes, shaken by the experience but determined not to show it. The crowds were packed six and ten deep all along the way,
straining against the cordons. He scented that things could turn nasty but was determined not to lose his cool. Another stone pursued a sharp trajectory over his head and found a casualty in the crowd. A man dropped down and was trampled and the sea closed again. A moment later a red rose hit him between the eyes, and the beat dramatically picked up tempo. He was too involved in the dynamic to falter, too spaced out by the high of performing to take note of the danger.

The heat was starting to grow intolerable. He was light-headed from working so hard with the music and decided to mount one of the horses and sit in reverse saddle facing his god. To his surprise he managed to do this first time and to position himself without startling the horses. He had dreaded fluffing it and earning the rebuke of the crowd. Instead, he held his own and kept a hold above the animal’s trembling musculature, its house-sized heart beating time in its interior.

They were moving slower now, and the crowds were growing voluble as curiosity increasingly gave way to abuse. He took comfort in the fact that the Praetorian Guard were his support, although his mind was cut across by the fear they would defect and turn on him and his supporters. He knew that if the worst happened he wouldn’t stand a chance. The crowd would lend its support and he would be liquidated within minutes.

He did his best to keep his nerve and present an imperturbable face to the public. He concentrated on the music again, and here and there in the crowd there were gay boys saluting him with pink banners. He recognized some of them from the baths, while others had clearly chosen the occasion to come out. Each time he caught sight of them he felt a reciprocal sense of sharing and a pride that they should dare to go public. He hoped that their sexuality would persuade them to join his religion and consolidate its premises in Rome.

He thought he could hear dry thunder rock the sky. There was no sign of the densely packed crowds thinning. All the way out to the graffiti-slashed suburbs people had gathered under the monitoring eye of strategically placed troops. The buildings grew uglier,
as warehouses and tenements jostled for space. The sky was clouding over, and he could feel a storm twitching on the horizon.

He quickly dismounted, having decided to dance the remaining distance to the temple. People stared at him and his entourage and either remained silent out of respect for him as emperor or loudly voiced their disapproval. The music came on again as he started to dance, the full Dionysian assault of instruments lashing the crowd. He knew they were starting to turn the situation around and hold their own. The risk he had taken in declaring both his sexuality and religion was finding payback in the way they performed. The more he danced the more he realized the energy protected him and his group. It was the dynamic that made them invulnerable. He knew that if they lost the rhythm the crowd would move in for the kill.

He estimated they had less than half a mile to go. Suddenly, to his left, he saw Hierocles pushed right up against the barrier, watching the procession with a blank face. When their eyes met he smiled but in a way that lacked commitment. He looked marginally furtive, and the sassy youth leaning against him told the story.

For a moment he doubted it was Hierocles, and when he looked back his sight was obscured by the moving wall of people. He couldn’t find him in the angular slab of bodies and tried to push the idea from his mind. He had to keep on moving or go under. Jealousy fired him to new heights of exhibitionism. He caught the flowers being thrown and used them to beat time on his body. He was in a state of orgiastic frenzy. He wanted Rome to feel his heartbeat throbbing in its arteries. Drops of warm rain were starting to splash his skin as the cloud ceiling lowered. He almost welcomed the rain after the oppressive heat. There was a rumbling detonation like a building had collapsed, and when he threw his eyes up to the sky he saw it scissor-kicked by white lightning. The crowds, too, had scented rain and people were breaking for cover. Unable to free themselves from the wedge they began to kick out at the obstruction. He could see fights breaking out in the crowd as the rain started to get heavy. The storm had broken in answer to the music, and the drums competed with the thunder’s reverberating bass.