Cast Not the Day (31 page)

‘Words!’ he cried, with a sweep of his arm so close to my face that I thought at first he was about to strike me. ‘The time for such questioning is past. Let me tell you something, my clever young friend, that once long ago I told your friend Aquinus. The people have no care for your reason and your complicated truths. They want certainty – simple, easy certainty – and I give it to them. That is why I shall triumph in the end, and that is why you and your chattering philosopher friends will fail. You can go and tell Aquinus and the magistrates this: their star is waning, their power is spent, along with the usurper Magnentius. I am the future now, and if Aquinus sets himself against me he will be swept away.’

He turned and strode to the carved sideboard, where the silver wine-flask stood. He did not hear me till the metal of my boot sounded on the floor behind him. He swung round startled, and for a moment, before his flushed round face set firm, I saw fear in his eyes. It was small consolation for the message I had been ordered to give.

‘The magistrates instruct me, sir, to tell you this. In the interests of harmony they will leave the temples unrepaired. They request, in return, that you use your influence to restore calm to the streets. Peace among the citizens, they say, must come first. All else, they hope, may be resolved in time.’

‘Well, well,’ he said with a smile. He turned back to the wine-flask, slowly refilled the goblet, and raised it in his hand, fingering the delicate relief work of grapes and vine leaves and twisting tendrils.

I stood where I was, saying nothing, waiting while he savoured the moment. But my mind had been working; and now, as I watched him, it came to me with sudden clarity what he had become. He had toppled the old gods, and in their place he had set nothing but himself. He was a deceiver who had come eventually to believe his own lies, not seeing that what he served was nothing but his own vanity.

When at last he spoke he did not trouble to look at me. Even in victory there was no greatness of soul in him. ‘Everything that happens is the will of God,’ he declared. ‘But perhaps we might have some little influence with the citizens, after all. You may tell your friends at the Council that we require funds. Then, perhaps, something can be done. And now, goodbye. I am a busy man.’

‘I see from your face,’ said Aquinus, ‘that you have come to know the man.’

I nodded, and stared out across the summer garden. Wallflower and roses grew in a small raised bed under the wall. The air smelled of rosemary and lavender. It was later the same day, and I had gone to Aquinus and told him all that had been said, feeling he was the only one who would understand.

‘There are depths of corruption,’ he said, after a short pause, ‘that it takes experience to perceive.’

‘It is the unreason of it,’ I said. ‘It was like listening to a madman. What I can’t understand is that people are taken in.’

‘Well, Drusus, it is not so difficult, if one is dishonest enough. He uses an old sophistical trick, and his innocent followers are too simple to know what he is doing. What you said to him is true: there is no freedom without knowledge, nor is there what he likes to call salvation. But such questions are beyond him; he is no doctor of the soul. In place of what is true he purveys sugared sweets, casting them about like a confectioner at a carnival – the promise of eternal life, an end to doubt, and other pleasing stories. But there is no truth that does not begin with mastery of self, and that, most of all, he does not know.’

He sighed and looked out at the urns and flowers in the dappled sunlight.

Shaking my head I said, ‘Yet he seems so sure; nothing shakes him.’

‘It is an aspect of ignorance. But there is a certain structure to the world, whether he knows it or not, and he defies it at his peril, as all men do . . . Ah now, here is Clemens with some cakes and wine. Come and sit down, Drusus, and take some refreshment. You look as if you could do with it.’

The magistrates, when I reported what the bishop had said, thanked me with glum, unhappy faces and shook their heads. They did not tell me what they intended to do about his demands, and it was not my place to question them.

The whole business sickened me, and I was glad to return to my own duties, and my troop of men. But whatever transpired between the magistrates and the bishop, there followed a stillness in the city in the weeks afterwards, which those who knew no better called peace. No more temples were set upon, and the bishop’s mobs melted away.

‘He despises the city government,’ I said to Marcellus, one day when we were discussing it, ‘ – the magistrates, the decurions; all of them. He knew they would not dare oppose him, and he was right. He is shrewd as a stoat, but why do they fear him? He is not strong. I have seen the weakness in his eyes.’

We were walking along the street beside the theatre, with our cloaks pulled up. Autumn had arrived, blowy and unsettled and suddenly grey. From under the arches, the gamblers and hawkers eyed my uniform as we passed. Some of their faces I recognized; but none of them spoke to me, or gave any sign of knowing me. They saw the clothes, not the man; and, I reflected, the man too was different now.

We passed through the theatre entrance with its pediment of stone-carved masks and garlands. Inside we paused under the lee of the orchestra wall, where it was sheltered. Marcellus leant beside me, folded his arms and considered the high stage with its backdrop of arches and tiered red-granite columns.

‘In truth,’ he said, ‘I despise them too. They have gone soft, like animals kept too long in a cage. They no longer believe in anything but their comforts. Once, long ago, there was nothing but marsh and scrub where this theatre and this city stand. But men came here with a vision of what could be, and made it real. They adorned the city out of pride, and love of honour, and because they saw that it was good. But our noble councillors are not such men. They have forgotten what it was that made us great.’

He kicked a pebble, and watched as it danced across the marble-tiled floor. It had rained that morning – a sharp cold squall – and the marble shone like glass. ‘Have you seen Grandfather lately? He is starting to look old.’

I nodded. I too had noticed a change in him, a well-hidden weariness.

‘He drives himself too hard,’ I said.

‘Little wonder, when the magistrates run to him for everything. They are supposed to govern, but cannot even decide what lamp-oil to buy unless someone tells them. But it is not only that. It is the simple people too. It breaks his heart to see them deceived, and incited to tear the city apart. They don’t know what they are destroying, or what they would set in its place.’

Bitterly I said, ‘The bishop knows well enough.’

‘So he likes to think. But he is as much a part of the city as anyone. Grandfather says he is like a man who keeps a cub-wolf for a house-pet, believing he has tamed it. Then one day the beast grows powerful and turns on him.’

Across the theatre, halfway up the ascending rows of seats, an old attendant was sweeping leaves. I knew him from my life before, when the empty theatre had been one of my solitary haunts. He looked, then looked again, and raised a hand. I returned his greeting. I found I was thinking of Lucretia, and Albinus, and, for the first time in many months, of my father.

‘I sometimes wonder,’ I said presently, ‘whether the bishop is right when he says that people prefer the lie. Does a dog dwell upon the nature of truth? No, he thinks only of his belly, and when he has eaten he sleeps.’

I felt Marcellus’s hand on my arm. I had been looking elsewhere. But now I turned.

‘He has affected you more than you know,’ he said. ‘Don’t let him. It is a sickness of the soul. If you fix your eyes on the gutter, do not be surprised if you see only filth. Just because some men look wrongly, and see the good less clearly than others, does not mean the good is not. And even a dog can love, after his fashion.’

I frowned at the grey, cold sky.

‘Yes, Marcellus,’ I said eventually, ‘I suppose you are right.’

I felt his hand seek mine, and close around it. ‘Come, now. It is written all over you, it always has been. You are your own evidence that the bishop is wrong. He kills more than he knows, when he speaks thus.’

I nodded, and gave him a smile, and thought of his body beside me. The wind gusted. The leaves stirred and scattered.

Marcellus released my hand and walked a few paces off, and looked up at the shining red column, streaked with black. There was a small statue of Apollo in the niche beside it, naked, holding a lyre. I had not noticed it before.

‘Soon,’ he said turning, ‘it will be the solstice. Come out to the country with me, and clear your head. There is little more you can do here.’

We rode out west over frost-hard paths under a sharp clear sky.

The farm-hands had hung the great stone entrance-gate with mistletoe and clusters of red-berried holly, and put candles in their windows to the gods of the night – observances that were as old as the land, and as integral as the sowing and the harvesting and the cycle of the seasons. For a time we forgot the city, and spent the days taken up with one another. We hunted deer and hare, riding out with our nets and spears, our breath steaming in the frozen dawn, and Ufa prancing along beside us.

On the morning of the solstice, when the sun was no more than a cold silver disc low in the sky, we gathered with the servants at the little carved shrine. Aquinus, his head covered like a priest’s with the folds of his mantle, lit the flame and sprinkled incense, and whispered the ancient words.

I glanced across at Marcellus. He did not notice me. His eyes were fixed on the shrine, where the small clay figures of the household gods stood wreathed in wisps of fragrant smoke. His face was calm and intent, his mind dwelling upon some private place, beyond my reach. He could not have looked more beautiful.

Next day, having some estate business to attend to, he went off early with Tyronius the bailiff. I had intended to go out riding alone; but as I was dressing a servant tapped on the door and announced that Marcellus’s mother wished to see me.

‘What, are you sure?’ I said, looking at him with surprise and some alarm. Always, when I had visited before, she had kept to her own suite of rooms in the far wing of that vast house. It had become a thing I noticed; for though Marcellus had said it was nothing, and that she was always so, I had supposed, as one does, that she had some objection to me.

Now I asked myself why it was she had waited until now, when Marcellus was absent, to summon me.

She was sitting on a white-cushioned couch beside a small bronze statue of a naked youth, a fine-faced woman with bound-up hair and clear eyes. She wore a long gathered dress of silk embroidered with blue twining roses, and on her breast a delicate necklace of antique silver. She looked like something precious and fragile and rare, like the elegant polished furniture around her.

‘Please sit,’ she said, indicating with a graceful movement a chair with turned legs and ivory inlay. ‘How glad I am to meet you at last. Will you take wine? . . . No? Nor shall I.’

Her voice was measured and precise. She spoke quietly; but there was nothing weak about her. She enquired, in a studied yet desultory way, about my journey and my life. She listened with distant courtesy. Then she said, ‘Now tell me of Marcellus.’ It was an easy question, yet I felt the muscles in my stomach tighten.

I said, ‘He is well enough, madam. He has gone out with Tyronius; but he will be back in the afternoon.’

She gave me a look that said, ‘Do not treat me like a fool; I could ask him myself, if it were only his health and whereabouts that concerned me.’ Then she said, ‘He is last of the line.’

I nodded and said, ‘Yes, madam.’

There was a silence.

‘You see him more than any other. You know his friends in the city. Tell me, when do you suppose he will marry?’

Her eyes, so disconcertingly like his, fixed on me, waiting. I felt rough and crude beside her; I knew my cheeks were reddening and cursed inwardly, wondering what she would read into it.

‘I cannot tell,’ I said. ‘I expect he will choose when he is ready.’

She was not to be fobbed off. With a voice like crystal she said, ‘You are his closest friend. That is what he says. You can encourage him to do what is his duty, or’ – and here she paused until I looked up into her face – ‘or you can cause him to forget it. It would be a comfort to me to think I had your support.’

Our eyes locked then, like two men looking across their shields in battle. She had sprung her trap. I wondered how much she knew.

I said, ‘It is for Marcellus to choose his wife, not me. Yes, I am his friend; and I shall support him whatever he decides, and whomever he chooses.’

She regarded me coolly, not with anger, but with a vague look of surprise, like a fastidious-mannered woman in whose presence some coarse utterance has been made. She let the awkward silence grow; and I sat in my chair, resisting the urge to look away.

I knew she had drawn me onto what was, for me, dangerous unsure ground, and though I had spoken truly, I had not spoken what lay within my heart, and I was sure my feelings were written on my face. I waited. I had wanted more than anything for her not to dislike me. But I saw she had planned this meeting, every word of it, intending, if I had given the answers she sought, to suborn me into whatever scheme she had in mind for her son. The price of her liking was too high. I held my tongue, and set my mouth firm.