The Hadrian Enigma - A Forbidden History (17 page)

“
It shall be done, Caesar,” Geta replied as he waved us to follow him down a side track of the tent complex.

This was the first Antinous and I ever saw of Geta. We soon came to know him well. And it was our first impression of the emperor himself.

“
Your victim today, men,” Tribune Salvius Julianus informed us with an injection of respect as adults, or at least mature
meirakia
youths, “will be a young boar.”

The various groups of youths and their staff murmured appreciatively if apprehensively. Julianus was Hadrian’s Master of the Hunt who was also an advisor in the Law of Rome.

“
The beast was trapped two weeks ago in the scrubland of the Troas near the site of legendary Troy,” the Master of the Hunt continued. “Perhaps it holds the soul of the warriors Ajax or Hector? It is a junior from a herd of adults whose feistier members were caged for shipment to the arenas at Rome where wild game is in high demand. So your target is smaller than a full size beast.

You should be told the creature has had its tusks filed to a dull edge to protect you against accident or misadventure. Caesar doesn’t want to send one of you men home to your family hearths with body damage.

Being a boar, you are to prosecute the Hunt with whatever mount and weapons you see fit for the challenge,” Julianus continued. “No hounds are permitted; you will be obliged to rely on your own detection and hunting skills. The victim will be loosed into a netted funnel to ensure its eventual capture. But Caesar hopes members of the Hunt will corral and destroy the creature long prior to its entrapment. It’s up to you, men.”

Antinous murmured quietly to me. “It’s lucky, Lys, we brought our own ponies for this event, mounts who already know our weight, purchase, and signals, plus who trust us. I expected the Hunt victim to be a deer or something more elegant than a boar. Boars are eccentric targets. It’ll need deft footwork and daring. This won’t be easy without mastiffs, either.”

I had to nod in agreement.

“
If we work together as a team, Lys, as in the Pontines, maybe we’ll manage it,” Antinous whispered back.

Instead of the usual workaday back-cloths for bareback riding, we had brought our family’s new-fangled four-horned saddles. The saddles’ four corner pummels and seat are secured by a belly strap under the horse. This permits a better seat leverage than a back blanket, so a rider can more effectively brace himself to hurl a range of missiles. But only barely.

For weapons we assessed between lightweight short-javelins, throwing axes, bows-and-arrows, or even slingshot stones, none of which are to be disparaged. Both of us were well experienced in attacking with lightweight counter-weighted short-stave javelins projecting five-inch iron pierces for horseback hunting. Neither of our ponies, Blaze nor Tiny, nor we ourselves possessed the body-weight and expertly-braced riding seat necessary for wielding the long, heavy
pilum
spear used by cavalrymen. The
pilum
demands a large charger with a rider of a beefier body build than a 
meirakion
carries.

Despite our physical strengths which, since childhood competitive wrestling, sprint racing in armor, javelin casting, stone discus tossing, and the other athletics of the
palaestra
had built, we still had a little distance to go before our body weight could anchor the heftier battle weapons.

Nevertheless each of we six youngsters were already eligible for entry into military life, as our own fathers had done at the same age. We knew how a commission in the military was the speediest path to public advancement if we survived battle action, scrapes and wounds, foul camp water, disease, or other military perils.

Fortunately, Antinous and I had each brought five plumb-balanced dart javelins in their riding quivers, as well as our family’s antique stiff-leather hunting cuirasses, battered helmets, and chipped shin greaves to wear with our hip-length rider’s tunics.

The six youngsters appeared a rag-tag mob compared to the richly outfitted officers of the Guard in their service uniforms, or the barbarian costumes in dragon-scale chain-mail of the Scythian archers whose fidgety ponies paced nervously about. We learned how Scythian archers are the precision marksmen of Rome’s forces, with the most expert hired by Hadrian’s Praetorian Prefect, Turbo, for the special protection of Caesar.

This was the day we first learned of the rule how an Imperial Hunt is one of the few occasions when people around Caesar are entitled to be armed. Except for his Guard, weapons are generally forbidden in Caesar’s presence for security reasons.

Meanwhile Hadrian was dressed simply in hunting leathers, helmet, and side-weapons, mounted on a four-pummel saddle strapped atop a high, golden chestnut Nisaean stallion. This exotic stallion was unlike any animal we had ever previously seen. Its gilded pelt shone in the thin midday sun, and it hoofed the ground with spirited life. He was named
Persepolis
after his origin in the wilds of Parthia. To our eyes,
Persepolis
was the perfection of horse flesh.

When the sun reached mid-sky Julianus raised his whip of office to signal to his beaters to sound the display. A 
cornu
intoned darkly, drums rattled, and without further ado a cage was flied-open ahead of us.

A squat, hairy, nimble, black ball of furious darting energy was released onto the open plain. The Hunt was on! A dozen horses and their riders of varying sizes, uniforms, and ages leapt forward as one after the beast. The wild boar, all bustle and speed, hurtled forward into the scrub without a moment’s hesitation.

Despite the slight incline of the ground and the low rocky scrub, the beast slipped speedily out of sight behind rocks and foliage. The hunting pack had no idea if it was galloping non-stop towards the net funnel far away, or whether it was stalled somewhere beneath our very hooves out of sight. It was obviously canny enough to know when to move out of range, and when to stay still to hide.

Without hounds to smell it out or bark at sight, the creature was the master of the chase, denying we pursuers easy scouting.

Antinous and I, with our plucky ponies at the ready, had lurched forward first, followed by the entire Hunt with much noisy cheering, guffaws, and obscene shouts. Caesar was the third to crash forward on his golden-sheened Nisaean, but no one deferred to his status except the plait-haired barbarian with the tattooed face, Geta.

Each of the young men moved sweepingly across the course, around obstacles, into undergrowth, to seek it out. We each searched carefully for a glimpse of its hairy haunches and upright tail, speeding or stationary.

Now and then one of the boys would excitedly shout a sighting, but then decline the claim as it proved false. This ad hoc approach to tracing the beast didn’t appeal to Antinous and I. It lacked method. Half an hour elapsed as the teams eased carefully through the undergrowth searching for any signs of the quarry or its recent path.

Hadrian, the boys perceived, seemed to be in no urgent hurry to prosecute the chase, but ambled watchfully close behind the lads on his Nisaean giant.

Antinous and I followed a strategy we used in our hunts outside
Polis.
We
cross-referenced our scanning of the scrub so, as a duo, we applied a methodical stepped sweep to our search. Mind you, using mastiffs makes such hunting far easier. In lieu of dogs, signs of tracks, fresh droppings, broken scrub, hidden shadowy shapes, even smells were to be factored into the possible location or direction of the beast. This process was time consuming but offered a better chance of spotting the creature than mere guesswork. The boar wouldn’t appear in our sight simply because we wished it to appear.

Now and then I would silently signal to Antinous with a gesture towards a shape lurking behind a rock, so both of us would arc cautiously towards the site. Again and again, nothing.

On one occasion Antinous quietly point-marked a puddle of still-steaming pig’s piss which even Tiny and Blaze found noxious to the nostrils. Yet the boar had moved on. The direction seemed northwards, so we both guided our mounts in parallel in the same direction. Our ponies were as tense as we ourselves.

The other four lads seemed to be captivated by a separate search a hundred yards westwards, each a solitary searcher. The senior members of the hunt ambled lazily in the background, amused by our youthful intensity.

Suddenly with a rustle of foliage, a rasping grunt and cough, a fat furry bewhiskered blob snarling curled tusks leapt forward from a hidden nook and raced helter-skelter northwards. The beast grunted and rasped with each bound, bounce, or sideways dash. Tiny and Blaze lurched forward promptly at speed with a matched swing, sway, and swerve.

Antinous gripped his pony’s four-horn saddle firmly with his knees by sheer force of balance. His legs, thighs, and ankles pressed close to Tiny’s sides to steady his body weight to support a hold on the reins while his left hand balanced a javelin dart in readiness. Antinous was left-handed, you know. Tiny responded well to his knee pressures and hip sways as it danced through the scrub in speedy dives left then right, following the swerves of the boar with precision.

The wiry pony, all gristle and bone flecked with foamy sweat, knew the name of the game. He took it upon himself to keep close to the prey. The horse was as excited by the hunt as its rider.

Antinous’s body swayed smoothly with each shift in direction in a natural flow. Every muscle-fiber danced in a finely-tuned flexed response to the situation’s urgency. Yet he retained a firm balance, steady seat, and high stature in readiness for casting the dart.

His speeding reflexes had well absorbed his many years straddling ponies on the forested ranges beyond our hometown’s ramparts. Boars and game were regular targets of the hunt at
Polis
. Hunting and trapping was the local recreation which afforded special delicacies for feast days to honor solemn Artemis of the Hunt and her brother, beautiful Apollo, Healer of Heaven.

Yet only the boar knew the next instant’s hurtling direction, racing this way and then that, sensing the full danger of the situation and the grim intent of its pursuers.

Hadrian followed close behind, crashing through the scrub on his Nisaean. The eighteen year-olds arced in close proximity. Arrian was followed by Julianus and then Geta the Dacian. Two Praetorians cantered unevenly behind with two dark Scythian archers in close formation. The Praetorians were sullen bodyguards who protected the emperor’s person, while the archers were insurance against an unexpected danger.

The wily beast had been bolting hell-bent towards a landfall up ahead camouflaged behind a tangle of surrounding scrub. Antinous raced and scrapped and darted after it, keeping one eye on the grotesque bulk of the creature while marshalling all his reflexive senses into his javelin arm’s nerves to respond with precision. With extra dart-javelins in the quiver strapped to his pony’s neck if the initial cast failed to bring down the creature, his first attack would nevertheless need to be decisive.

However, in the speed of the hunt Antinous had not noticed the low cave entrance looming ahead, a refuge the pig may have calculated into its rapidly declining options.

I kept my eyes on Antinous as well as the emperor close behind as my own pony Blaze stumbled through the undergrowth somewhat less felicitously than my friend’s. I remained a distance behind by necessity of my mount’s less focused skill. I was close enough to the emperor to perceive the manner in which Hadrian cast his eye strategically over the victim’s narrowing chances.

I perceived the emperor’s elegant signal with his left arm to his thudding followers to arc around for a better encirclement of the beast. As his golden Nisaean bounded through the undergrowth with meticulous footwork and a fiery zest typical of the quality breeds, I detected Hadrian smiling to himself at the audacity of the young man racing ahead of him.

Antinous ignored Caesar’s
droit de seigneur
of first chance at the kill. Antinous’s daring was accompanied by the audacity to lurch into the hunt with heroic, if reckless, even ill-considered, abandon.

I had always appreciated this ‘strike first’ quality in Antinous. I found it to be a challenging facet of his character and one which gained him many victors’ points on the
palaestra’s
wrestling sands. But a sense of diplomacy and the unspoken protocol of the occasion restrained my urges --- not that Blaze gave me much opportunity for anything better. I remember asking myself, was I simply less feisty than my young friend? Antinous becomes fiercely tenacious under pressure.

From the short distance behind Tiny, I could see how Hadrian was closely observing Antinous’s every action. My blond friend’s excited tensions of musculature in neck, arms, shoulders, and thighs displayed their much-exercised tone as his entire physique poured forward from his saddle towards the urgent resolution of the hunt.

I discerned how Hadrian eyed the flecked fair hair streaming from beneath the rusty helmet, the occasional splash of sweat spraying behind, and the straining arm balancing the raised javelin for a powerful discharge.

As a friend who had known Antinous since earliest childhood I could appreciate the flowing line of his distended neck and its delineated nape of strands of coiled blond locks. His upper-body triangle of broad shoulders encased in an heirloom cuirass tapering to a slender waist projected those sinuous contours which only an agile young man’s slender hips, lean thighs, and tight butt proclaim to the world. These were coupled with a roseate flush of excitement on high cheekbones as he focused on the issue at hand.