Colosseum (29 page)

The altar and sanctuary of Hercules disintegrate: the demigod meets his fate, extinguished in a bath of flames.

The Field of Mars, glory of Augustus who held it so dear, burns too. The shrine of vengeful Mars, built by Octavian to celebrate the rightful retaliation that befell Brutus and Cassius, crumples like burnt paper.

Verus, far from the collapsing Capitoline, is finally safe and sound. His eyes reflect the shattered embers that were once known as Rome.

The arrival of a thankless dawn, filled with death and violence, marks the end of the first night of the fires in Titus's city.

Two more will follow. And two whole days.

The following morning begins with a sigh of relief: it is over, thanks be to the gods and
lares
. The She-wolf is injured, her ancient face soiled by smoke and wounds.

Verus is hard at work near the Forum. Along with several
untores
from the Ludus Argentumand a large number of shopkeepers, he is trying to co-ordinate the salvage effort. Titus has moved quickly to take care of his people. Titus is a good man, everyone knows that. But today discontent squirms through the wrinkles of his subjects' skinny, ragged bodies, miraculously safe and sound as they are. Like shining white lead, unease settles on the Romans' blackened souls, gradually poisoning them.

The rage of the wretched weighs like stone: the She-wolf has got her ass burnt and the usual phantoms are to blame, but Titus's toy has been left standing.

“You wait and see, they'll blame the Christians again,” predicts an old sawbones as he passes by, “…when maybe it was Him!” The implication is a terrible accusation, leveled at the master of the world.

The Amphitheater, a colossal farce of ancient stone, a marble giant now finished and ready for use, bears not a scratch. Verus looks at it again as he busies himself bandaging a girl's foot—it has been singed, but she will be fine. The child will only have to be careful not to put weight on it for a few days.

The house of games has been saved while the evacuees are forced to live in huts or on the street, a situation that serves only to stoke the flames burning in the hearts of the populace. That is why Titus has been so quick to help: a man can push his luck only so far.

But the oval theater represents an enormous and indelible weight on the wounded city.

The dead are buried on the first peaceful dawn. The fire has done the job of the funeral pyres. Without waiting for any ritual, it has purified the unlucky victims' bodies of any pestilence, leaving only bones and ashes to be cleared away. The Emperor has already arranged for the remains of ruined houses to be taken to Ostia without delay, using his fleet of wagons bearing the Eagle standard.

Cleared out
. The term echoes dangerously through the evacuees, brimming with bile.

And who takes care of their fallen brothers?

Who will pray for the innocent devoured by the flames?

Willing hands like those of Verus and his companions who, as soon as they have finished stitching the stitchable and bandaging the carnage with all the rags and pity they could lay their hands on, are off through the city streets on clumsy carts, lame as the thin, thirsty, fearful donkeys that drag them. It is wretched work: they must gather the remains of those burnt alive from amid the rubble—bones and skin like parchment, a few faces left amazingly intact despite the bodies they belong to having been carbonized, light as charcoal—putting them back together as best they can and placing them with care inside jute sacks that once contained beans and dried fruit, highlight of any table and bought with good money earned by hard work on the streets. The sacks now wind up at the bottom of carefully dug holes on the edge of the city, soon to be covered with rubble and earth. Before the season is out the grass will have erased the memory of the departed, joy will have returned to do the dirty work it has always done, and no one will remember those who failed to survive. But for the moment this is what has to be done to honor the dead. And Verus toils like a silent mule, without stopping to think about right or wrong.

Pyres appear in the city as well; ancient custom does not die, even beneath the fury of the tempest. But for those who escaped the flames by chance or by miracle, the bonfires of flesh and the coins on the eyes of the dead, ready to pay the ferryman for the journey to the underworld, have a very real impact. Today, Rome shuns fire like it would some awful disease. And who can blame it?

Verus happens to be nearby the Ludus Argentum when he spots some suspicious movement at the end of the road, next to the inn of the Proterus. The crowd of people, normally bent sadly over brooms or clutching rags in their hands in an attempt to clean up what little remains, is suddenly alert. They prick up their ears, listening out for the arrival of a new enemy. Verus cannot see properly through the bustle of bodies.

Perhaps the figure, approaching more slowly than an Indian elephant, does not have hostile intentions. But the air is thick with menace—gladiators' senses are finely tuned to danger. Verus drops what he is doing and runs to see what is happening, prey to the damned curiosity that has been getting him into trouble ever since he was a little boy.

First of all, he hears the murmur of the plebeians.

“Look at those two pieces of…”

Then he elbows his way through the crowd until he can finally lay his eyes on the last thing he wanted to see:
Julia.
By Domitian's side, hand in hand like a couple of lovers. They move haughtily through the streets of the fire-ravaged city, clean and lustrous as the eyes of a newborn babe, doused in more perfume than a harlot at the start of a night's work.

Naturally they are not alone. A group of Praetorians forms a square around them, a thoughtful gesture from the monarch himself. They flaunt the colors of authority, the bright blue of state officialdom. But no matter how much Titus dotes on his daughter, he would never surrender his own
personal
honor guard so that his first-born could parade them about like a dog on a leash. In any case, the Praetorian Guard is so vast that there are soldiers on hand for every whim and every job. Guardians of public order and invisible spies, even the
vigiles,
those lords of fire and water; all operate under the aegis of the Scorpion. All are part of the Guard. But is the so-called “blacks” that make up the cream of the organization, the Emperor's hounds with their wicked eyes and spotless cloaks.

In any event, those trained in the
Castra Praetoria
know their stuff. That is why the crowd, despite making a lot of noise, does not dare approach the men in blue who protect the strolling nobles with a circumspect gaze.

The reasons for which Julia and Domitian find themselves here are good ones, too. It is just one more on the long list of indulgences with which Titus showers his populace, this time by distributing some measure of comfort. Whether it is bread, water, blankets or simply coins, all outstretched hands come away with something these days. But the Empire's money, doled out by the couple without any show of respect for the drama these citizens have just lived through, will end up doing more harm than good, of that the young Briton is quite sure.

Perhaps it is the look on the faces of the two nobles as they stroll along, fingers interlocked and glances heavy with desire. Her impudent smile betrays the girl's sixteen years, and her vacuous laughter explodes every time she trips over a pebble. The defiant stare of her uncle, the dashingly handsome son of the She-wolf with his hands laden with coin. He does not have to say a thing: it is quite clear just from looking at him that he holds the normal folk in utter contempt. He does not even have to go to the trouble of
feeling
superior, by fortune or by virtue. Domitian
is
superior. By birth.

Enjoy it, commoners!

Heal your wounds with silver from my house.

Cleanse the soot from your injured skin with the treasury of the Judeans, the Egyptians, the barbarous enemies of Rome.

Fill your pockets with my mercy and worship me like a god.

All this and more seem to say the eyes of the son of the Empire. The reflections shine unbearably off his decorated cape under the rising heat of the sun.

“Shame on you!” shouts a baker's wife while her husband, terrified, grabs her by the arm before a Praetorian can spot her.

Domitian ignores her, only Julia's mood seems to darken for a moment. But it is only a moment, a meaningless trifle after which the stroll continues on its brazen course.

A skinny, toothless man scoops up a fistful of
assarii
scattered with nonchalance by the perverted uncle. Scrap metal worth no more a bagful of bread, if only an oven had been left standing anywhere within seven leagues.

“Is this what my son's life was worth, you stingy wretch?” The man's eyes brim with tears.

He has lost someone dear. Everyone has lost someone. Everyone except
them
.

Rich bastards.

This time Domitian reacts to the affront. He is still a Roman officer and is not in the habit of letting people call him a wretch. He stops the convoy. His guards advise against it, but he is not dissuaded.

Julia shakes her head and tells him to let it go, but Domitian is an asshole. He walks up to the toothless man without saying a word. The two are separated by the wall of guards.

The prince stares at the plebeian from his side of the imperial wall of iron, and spits in his face.

And right then, all hell breaks loose.

The commoner instinctively reacts with a head-butt, but he is too short and the blow lands on a Praetorian's nose. Unfortunately the guard is decked out in iron from head to foot and it is the toothless man who bleeds first, smashing his face on the soldier's helmet.

A mere scratch, best to leave things that way.

But the mob is dying to avenge the calamity that has befallen it from out of the blue. They are furious with Titus and his relatives: as long as his father Vespasian was at the helm everything went smoothly. A little disorder but no disasters, may the gods clasp him to their breast.

But since Titus took over, not yet two years ago, the city has already suffered a plague and a fire. What next? Will the circus lions escape and devour the innocent? A hailstorm without end? Will it rain shit?

“Fuck our leaders!” The toothless man launches himself into the attack with a platoon of hopeless commoners by his side.

The brawl begins in an instant: the Praetorians are trained to conduct pitched battles, not street fights. Their square cannot resist the pressure of the disorderly surge of a hundred bodies and soldiers fall to the ground. The fury meted out on one of them rivals the fate of Troy, as four filthy common folk tear his helmet off and smash his head in without mercy.

In the turn of an hourglass the warrior of Rome is covered in bruises, not a single healthy tooth left in his mouth.

Even the “virtuous” daughter of the Empire does not come out of the brawl unscathed, receiving such a forceful slap to her thigh that she will be able to make out five fingers for the next ten days. She screams, of course, and Verus's eyes light up.

She spots him as well, amid the chaos. She has been torn from Domitian's grasp, who is too busy kicking some beggar and his ragged kids in the balls.

The Briton forces his way through as best he can, careful not to hurt anybody, but it is difficult to keep his composure in the middle of the fray.

A little girl is pulling Julia's hair and she is screaming again. The child grins as if she has just found a shiny gold coin in a fresh pile of crap. Then she pulls harder, until the wheat-colored strands snap and Julia is on the point of fainting.

Now Verus can see it in her eyes, as clear as a winter morning:
fear.
Terror that she is not going to make it, that there is no way out. Julia realizes she is up to her neck in trouble. Who can say where her uncle has got to. All she can see around her are ugly, dirty faces, belonging to the very people for whom she had her servants brush her hair this morning into a style that would do Aphrodite proud.

The young gladiator is elbowing his way through the swelling violence of the crowd when the inevitable finally occurs. A Praetorian makes a sudden movement; almost certainly he does not wish to really hurt anyone, but staying cool in the middle of a fire is no easy task. Impossible, even. His sharpened sword lodges itself in a red-haired man's chest, stabbing into his heart like a lightning bolt.

The man collapses, eyes open wide, and time stands still: a long moment of nothing, before madness explodes like the belly of a volcano. Blood and violence fill the street and the Praetorians are at risk of being lynched. Domitian, forced to climb up a drainpipe to reach safety, defends himself as best he can. From atop an unsealed roof, he looks on helplessly as his beloved niece comes under attack.

The girl is stuck in the middle of it and things are about to turn nasty. There are four men around her, now five. Hungry for sex and vengeance, blackened by smoke right down to their poor souls.

“I feel like busting your ass, imperial bitch!”

And not just in a manner of speaking.

Verus cannot simply stand aside and throws himself forwards, elbows held high. He wipes out one of them—a well-built blond man—with a punch to the nose and sends a second to the ground with a powerful slap. The next two need something a little firmer, so he picks up a stick and breaks a few bones. The last man standing legs it—legs are all he has left.

The Briton takes Julia by the hand and leads her away. She follows without a word, grateful and dazed as only a naïve girl can be. They run like crazy away from the brawl and slip into an empty house cloaked in darkness, windows consumed by the fire. They stand facing each other, now: heavy breathing and too many thoughts.