Death of an Empire (42 page)

The plebs poured into the amphitheatre and took up positions on the wide tiers of seating surrounding the arena. The hard stone benches could be softened with cushions, and some provident families had brought along a goodly supply for their comfort. Around the arena itself, and close enough to see the action clearly, patricians sat on special cushioned seats, while the emperor, his family and his special guests enjoyed a special viewing box that was fitted with every imaginable luxury.

For the next two hours, the circus filled with laughing, festive families, groups of young men eager for entertainment, the elderly with rugs, cushions and baskets of food, and girls in their finest clothing, giggling behind their face scarves and endeavouring to show the delicacy of their hands with much fluttering of their hennaed fingers. Even the healers began to feel excitement building in them, as the sun rose over the great open roof and the stone benches warmed pleasantly. Cadoc attacked Rhedyn’s picnic basket with a ferocious appetite and Finn encouraged Myrddion to eat his share or he’d get nothing. In all, with Cadoc cheerfully munching on a folded envelope of bread filled with beef and vegetables, children running up and down the stairs, the noise of thousands of merrymakers and the warmth of the sun, Myrddion felt his reservations begin to drain away.

Brazen trumpets signified the beginning of the entertainment. A brilliantly cloaked and polished troop of the Praetorian Guard marched into the centre of the arena to protect an oiled, curled and beautiful courtier, who faced the crowd, bowed to the empty imperial box and then made a flourishing gesture to the waiting crowd. They responded with cheers, catcalls and wolf whistles. As the sound of the epicure’s voice rose to the roof of the great structure, Myrddion marvelled at the understanding of acoustics that Roman engineers demonstrated through the amplification of this simple, reedy voice. For trivial entertainments such as this, a marvel had been built that trapped sound so that every word could be heard by every member of the audience as the drama unfolded below them.

‘Citizens of Rome, proud descendants of Romulus and Remus, know you that Italia is now safe from the ravenous attacks of the barbarian, Attila. Emperor Valentinian gives thanks for the efforts of Pope Leo, Consul Avienus and Prefect Trigetius who acted as our emissaries to Attila. The emperor presents these games for the
pleasure of his people as a gesture of gratitude for our salvation.’

To the sound of more trumpets, the courtier and his Praetorian escort left the arena, to be replaced by a group of muscular gladiators representing the four camps of Retiarii, Thraces, Secutores and Hoplomachi. Confused by the different names and accoutrements of the gladiators, Myrddion entered into conversation with a young, clean-shaven hairdresser from the district of Mons Ianiculus, who happily took the opportunity to share his knowledge as he described the different functions of the combatants.

‘They don’t all use swords, yet they’re all called gladiators,’ Myrddion argued. ‘How can anyone follow what’s happening when there’re so many different categories of warrior?’

The hairdresser shrugged with a toss of his elegantly oiled and curled head. ‘You have a beautiful head of hair, sir. I could sell it for several gold pieces for wig making if you should ever feel the need for coin. My name is Dido, and I live on the Street of Hanging Lanterns. You can find me on the Mons Ianiculus, where everyone knows me.’

Myrddion reddened but remained polite, resisting the impulse to twist his hair out of sight inside his cloak. ‘Thank you for the offer, Citizen Dido, but I believe I’ll keep my hair for the moment. I’ll gladly consult you if I should change my mind.’

The gladiators began to spread out and take up their positions on the floor of the arena immediately below the audience.

The Retiarii fought naked except for a loincloth and a belt, and were armed with tridents, nets and four-bladed daggers, while a long armguard of leather and plated metal extended up their left arm and over onto their breast. This manica had a metal shoulder shield that offered flimsy protection for the neck and lower face. Myrddion was amazed at the deftness of these gladiators as they threw the nets with the left arm and snared the weapons of the
Secutores, seeking to draw their opponents close to their wicked tridents or one of the four-bladed knives.

Equal in strength, the Secutores carried the rectangular shields of the legions and the gladius, or sword. Their helmets protected the whole head, including the face, so that only two small eyeholes permitted any vision. Greaves protected their legs and small manicas protected their arms. Disaster came speedily to any Retiarius who lost his net. The trident was a toy compared with the vicious power of the gladius, which was honed to razor sharpness by men who were dependent on that edge of iron for their next breath.

The crowd began to cheer for their favourites, but it took some time for the healers to untangle who was who. Burus wore a yellow feather on the crest of his helmet; Barca favoured red, while Colchis was from Asia Minor and wore a blue scarf tied to his gladius. One by one, Myrddion put names to the twenty matched pairs who were fighting in the arena. Colchis was one of the Thraces, who wore heavy leg wrappings to protect themselves from the waist down. His shield was perfectly rounded and decorated with a griffin dedicated to the goddess Nemesis. Waiting, poised and deadly, for an opening, the falx, a curved Thracian sword, was held in the right hand and to the rear as the combatants circled each other.

Against his better judgement, Myrddion felt a thrill of excitement as the superbly trained warriors fought each other in a ritual dance of death that was vile yet engrossing. Then, when Myrddion had almost succumbed to the seduction of the combat, a Retiarius was brought into danger by his net, yanked forward by a vicious grip on one end of the heavy, woven rope that his Secutore opponent had tangled in his shield. Caught off balance, the Retiarius was forced back with a sword at his throat. The swift manoeuvre was elegant and practised, and the healer would have
admired it had a man’s life not hung on the end of its smooth delivery.

The crowd screamed its approval or booed the loss of their champion. The successful Secutore looked around the arena, asking permission from the crowd to kill his prisoner – or spare his life. Myrddion watched aghast as some thumbs went up and others went down. Almost immediately, the crowd decided that a man’s life should end. A slash of the sword, a backward step and a fountain of blood arced out from the Retiarius’s neck, staining the sand around him with his life’s blood. Dido whispered that, normally, gladiators delivered the fastest possible death blow, but the first blooding of the day demanded a good dowsing in gore. The crowd was eager, and they howled as the Retiarius bled to death and perished with their screams of enjoyment ringing in his ears.

Myrddion thought he was going to vomit, more at the reaction of the crowd than at the death of a single warrior. Children sucked their thumbs, played at cat’s cradle or chewed on bread or honeyed buns while devouring the bloodletting below them with wide, curious eyes.

‘What happens to children who grow up attending such displays?’ Myrddion appealed to Dido for an explanation of the effects of seeing so much death. ‘Are they more violent? More callous? I can’t believe that nothing changes in them!’

‘Shite, Colchis!’ Dido yelled. ‘What were you thinking?’

The hairdresser’s champion had joined his dead companion on the sand, his torso streaked with blood and sweat. When Dido put his thumb down, relegating a man he had been cheering to a quick beheading, Myrddion turned his back on his neighbour in disgust.

The tempo of the battlefield speeded up as the gladiators wearied and sensed the boredom building in the crowd. Driven to increased risk-taking and flashy feats of arms, the gladiators began
to fall and, almost uniformly, were sentenced to death by the crowd. Eventually, only the final twenty survivors of the tournament remained alive. Panting as they stood or kneeled on the sand, the men saluted the crowd with their raised weapons. Finally, Myrddion understood the reason for the opening salutation to the emperor, and his blood ran cold at the thought of such institutionalised murder.

‘Cadoc?’ Myrddion turned to his apprentice as servants scurried into the arena to sling bodies into a cart and spread fresh sand over the bloodstains. ‘How can such a spectacle be entertaining? Don’t the crowds see those men as real?’

‘They seem to be enjoying themselves, master. They gamble on their favourites, scrawl their names on walls or send them love letters . . . or more.’

‘How can you sentence someone to death if you know him – or even of him? I don’t like this entertainment, Cadoc, I really don’t.’

‘It’s no worse than battle, master,’ Finn added, always ready to acknowledge both sides of the world. ‘And we accept battlefield wounded without any qualms.’

‘But can’t you see that we don’t take enjoyment from their injuries and death? Cadoc? Finn? There is a difference.’

‘Aye, master, I suppose there is. I was driven almost to madness when I watched Katigern die, and yet this display doesn’t affect me as much. Perhaps Rome is a . . .’ Finn groped for words. ‘Perhaps Rome is a moral stain that inhibits something in our souls?’

Myrddion lasted another two hours in the Amphitheatum Flavium.

He found himself watching mounted bowmen, called Sagittarii, as they fought bulls with iron spikes used to extend and sharpen their horns. Sometimes the bulls won. They watched convicted felons, the Noxii, struggle to the death, some blindfolded and armed with swords pitted against unarmed opponents who could
see. Somehow, Myrddion’s tangled and compromised sense of right and wrong was less offended by this punishment. That night, he would consider how far Finn’s description of moral stains had infected him, that he should damn felons to an agonising and often extended death – as if the manner of their death were less important than that of other citizens.

Bestiarii fought a collection of exotic animals such as lions, spotted cats, long-horned buffalo and creatures stranger still, some with elongated necks. Myrddion’s sympathies were with the beasts, which were so beautiful in their strange, vivid pelts. Whether armed with claws, teeth or horns, they invariably perished, although occasionally a bestiarius was wounded. Of greater interest to Myrddion were the Venatores, trained to create a spectacle by using a dangerous beast to perform amazing tricks. As neither man nor beast was hurt by this entertainment, Myrddion could bear to watch. He had watched several hundred men die while a band played jolly music and street sellers plied a brisk trade up and down the benches.

Eventually, he could stand the proceedings no longer. Although noon had not long passed, and the heat wasn’t extreme, he surrendered his place on the bench and fled downwards towards the exits. He wanted to cover his ears so he was deaf to the noise of trumpets, lyres, horns and flutes played by capering musicians dressed in manic, highly coloured animal costumes.

Music and the brassy scent of blood followed him along the wide streets and back into the subura, where he stopped at a public bathhouse and scraped his flesh with a blunt strigil until it was red. Then, when the pain of his self-abuse shook him back to himself, he wept salty tears as he stood waist deep in water, so that even the curious procurers who gathered at the baths refrained from accosting such a madman. When the cold water finally cleared his head, he began the long journey home. Hours had passed, and his
apprentices looked up from a simple meal with eyes that were both sympathetic and guilty.

With a sense of profound shame, Myrddion suddenly realised that he was very hungry, so he devoured the stew that Bridie pressed on him. Then, without another word to anyone, he rolled himself into a blanket on his pallet and fell into a deep sleep.

CHAPTER XV

THE MORAL STAIN

Half a world away, a sacrifice of a different kind was being enacted, as ugly as the games in Rome, although smaller in scale. Instead of a sun-drenched circus, this place of blood was a cavern exposed by the waves at low tide, yet set deeply into a cliff protruding out into the wild ocean. To the north was the fortress of Tintagel, and to the south were the turbulent coves where the small fishing villages of the west clung precariously to the beetling cliffs.

The pebbles and crushed shells beneath the participants’ feet were cold and wet, like the air in this dank, Styx-dark place buried deep in the heart of the hill. Fourteen cloaked figures had entered the cavern as darkness came, but only thirteen would leave when the rising tide began to lap the entrance to this natural temple.

The worshippers were swathed in dark cloaks that disguised their bodies and masked their respective sexes. Their faces were disguised by crude masks made of wood, plaster and coarse wool to mimic natural hair. The blank eye-holes of the disguises were edged with shell or polished stone, so that even in this preternatural gloom the glow of the single oil lamp caught their glitter, with its pretence of a baleful pair of eyes.

A gourd was shaken, and the dried seeds in its interior rattled eerily like tiny bones clicking together. The single light source, the
grisly blank faces and the heavy shadows combined with this jarring sound to create a miasma of superstition and unseen, unclean gloom. The smell of rotting seaweed, tossed by the tide into the invisible corners of the womb-like space, was partially disguised by the heavy perfume of the oil being burned, a costly, oppressive muskiness that was female in suggestion, but too intrusive and powerful to be pleasant. A faint suggestion of dead fish permeated everything, as if this women’s place was corrupted by unspeakable sins.

The cavern possessed only two items that suggested the hand of man. A single rock, smooth, black and roughly the length of a man, lay prone within the deepest part of the cavern beyond a shelf of stone that had been tumbled by the action of the sea. At some unimaginable time in the past, human hands had chipped this rock to trace curves and channels upon its obsidian surface. In shapes that were older than Celtic interlace, yet stronger and more vigorous than the carvings of more sophisticated artisans, the unknown artist had formed crude depictions of serpents, owls, strange birds with women’s faces and a long worm with grotesque, over-sized wings. In the fitful lamplight the creatures seemed to move, although the carvings were raw and unpolished. The perfumed oil caused the brain to play tricks on the eyes, so that the shadows of the celebrants dancing on the walls mimicked the monsters carved into the stone.