B007IIXYQY EBOK (6 page)

And in Seneca’s eyes, something jumped. It was, for a quick, sharp moment that seemed full enough to hold a life, as though they knew one another. The old man felt he turned a corner into some timeless place and collided with himself as a child. How well Seneca knew that look of ardent young eyes brimming with questions that would drive one to madness if not followed to their end.

Even Grannus paused, put off balance by the oddness of the moment.

And Endymion spoke. It was a grave impertinence for a slave to speak to anyone freeborn if not addressed first, and to address a man with the rank of Senator was a criminal act. But rank is of little importance to one so close to being dragged out of the world, and he had a boy’s pure trust in a hero whom he imagined to be all-knowing.

“Please, I beg your kindness,” he began; there was such self-possession in his tone that Seneca saw clearly how he would look as a man.

“I would be a learned man, as you are. I…I know by heart your treatise
On the Brevity of Life
and your essay
On Anger.
Speak for me and you shall not regret it. I will serve you all your days.”

“Rabid pup,” Grannus shouted, jerking him away. “Stuff a rag in his mouth.”

Seneca met the boy’s eyes for an instant more, quite evidently moved by his plight. He raised his right hand, ordering the bearers not to move.

Then a man of the crowd cried out to Seneca.
“Clarissimus!
Did Socrates own five hundred cedarwood tables, twelve estates and forty million in gold—and half the isle of Britannia?”

Seneca’s glance shifted warily about.
Not this again.

“Read us an ode!” came another strident voice. “I’ve been in the country of late—I haven’t heard the latest in brazen, shameless flattery!”

Seneca scowled at his tormentors, looking like some disgruntled river god.

In these days it seemed to the philosopher that the people let no opportunity pass to make sport of him, and the taunts stung all the more because somewhere in the stillness of his mind he suspected he deserved them. He
was
rich enough to ransom an emperor. And he had written lyrics in praise of Nero’s mother Agrippina that made him queasy to recall. Now people pointed to the boy, nodding and smiling knowingly. And saying what? That Seneca was so much the slave of passion that he could not make the short journey to the Palace without pausing to secure a boy for the night’s dalliance?

When Seneca turned back to Endymion, it seemed to the boy that a curtain dropped in the philosopher’s eyes. With a sharp gesture of his hand Seneca motioned his bearers to move on.

Endymion felt no pain as Grannus struck him across the mouth, for the pain inside was worse. The world’s heart was ripped open; within was nothing but worms and rot. The great man was ruled not by his philosophy, but by others’ opinions, like any common shopkeeper. Endymion guessed that even the philosopher’s reading in public was merely for show—the people expected him to have a bookroll always in hand. As Grannus kicked the boy to the ground once more, Endymion felt as though his soul had been crushed under horses. If all good did not rest in Seneca, then where was it? Not in any man, surely. He knew then that even if the Fates softened toward him and granted him long life, never again would he be able to see another, not even an emperor or king, as greater than he was.

He knew the desolation of one adrift on the night sea.

As Grannus and the patrolman of the Vigiles led the boy down Mercury Street, and to his execution, a voice arresting as a trumpet fanfare brought all three to a halt.

“Lucius Grannus! Stand there!”

Spitting a curse, Grannus turned round. Unknown to the fuller and the boy, the call of the crier had attracted the attention of another man—the guest of honor borne in the first litter.

The garlanded litter had been set down. Its occupant, a man of late middle years, approached them at the stately, unhurried pace of one accustomed to making others wait. His face, possessed in his youth of an ascetic handsomeness, had long since settled into pleasant and comfortable softness; retreating black and silver hair accentuated a formidable forehead. He had the look about him of one who neglected the body for the mind—his complexion was pallid; his hands were cushioned and dead-white. A once-firm body was beginning to go gently to fat, and about his eyes were deeply engraved lines from long nights of squinting over faded manuscripts by lamplight, reading the great works or dictating books of his own. Though there was a hint of indulgence about his eyes—he had the look of one who would deliberate long before issuing a punishment and then worry over it later—he was quite obviously the sort of man only a fool would attempt to deceive; when roused, as he was now, those eyes had the ruthless directness of a hawk’s. His toga was immaculately white; on the tunic beneath was just visible the broad purple stripe of a senator. He had the barest limp, which somehow only added to his dignity.

As the crowd shrank back to give him room, they exchanged looks of simple disbelief. What could such a man as this
care for the doings of a fuller and a runaway slave? For this was Marcus Arrius Julianus, one of the half-dozen most influential men of the Senate; his ancestry, rich with illustrious names, could be traced to the time of the First Punic War. Any citizen in the crowd could have recited to a traveler from afar all there was to know about this man. He was one of Seneca’s dearest friends. Lately he had returned from the province of Upper Germania, where he had served as military governor at the fortress of Mogontiacum on the Rhine until he was called home for the honor of a consulship, which meant he was nominally co-ruler, for a short time, with Nero, though in reality it was an empty honor, for Nero shared power with no one. A master of many disciplines, he was as familiar with the arts of the architect-engineer as he was with military strategy, the history of nations, and the natural sciences. He was celebrated as the greatest living authority on the savage Germanic tribes, the Chattians, Hermundures and their neighbors, and had completed thirty volumes of a proposed fifty-volume work on their customs and beliefs. It was well-known he fervently wished to retire but that Nero’s military council would not allow it—and that the cause was a renegade Chattian chieftain named Baldemar, who had been ravaging the frontier towns of Upper Germania for a decade. This Chattian chief sent no emissaries, refused to give hostages and would not negotiate; clearly a war was needed to control him. But Nero would not order a campaign—he needed all his resources to pay for his sumptuous stage plays and extended days of chariot races—and both Nero and his council firmly believed Marcus Arrius Julianus the only commander able to control the Chattian chieftain through diplomacy. Because of Baldemar, it was commonly said, old Julianus would likely die in the barbarous wastes of Germania.

“He’s coming for
you,
Grannus,” called out a voice in the crowd. “It’s that toga full of moth holes you gave him for one washed just once!” A raw burst of laughter came from the curious who paused to watch. As Marcus Arrius Julianus approached the boy, the soft, hissing call,
“Clarissimus!”
followed him like a wake.

“Grannus smells like a goat’s behind.”

“You’re supposed to wash the
clothes
in it, Grannus, the
clothes.”

The Senator suppressed a displeased look as the mild breeze brought him the first scent of Grannus. He nodded at the boy. “Turn him around,” he said with soft finality. “I want to see him.”

“He’s mine, fair and paid for, most noble one,” Grannus said, bowing awkwardly too many times, his red lips stretched into a broad smile. “He’s uncommonly vicious—you’d not want him.”

Marcus Julianus ignored Grannus. Gravely the Senator lifted the boy’s chin. Grannus seethed with irritation, too intimidated to protest. Endymion met the older man’s worried but gentle eyes for a moment, then cast his own down, faintly embarrassed because he did not know what was expected of him. Then carefully, solemnly, and almost as if he feared it, Julianus drew the amulet from the boy’s tunic and turned the pouch of black leather over in his hands. Endymion was aware of tension in the older man’s face, as of profound emotion under tight control. During all this, Grannus lowered his shaggy head and made a rough sound in the back of his throat—he was a hound held in check while a larger hound snatched his bone.

“My good man, you are mistaken,” Marcus Julianus said finally in a voice of smooth dismissal. “The slave is mine. But to avoid inconveniencing you over the error, I will buy him from you. Nestor!” he called to an immaculately groomed freedman-secretary who smelled of hyacinthus oil. The Senator nodded curtly at Grannus. “Pay him. The whole purse. At once.”

Nestor dropped a purse heavy with coins of gold into Grannus’ cupped hands. Grannus started when he peered inside. He would not have gotten as much had he sold his entire shop. Greed warred briefly with his eagerness to see the boy punished. Then he grinned, displaying yellowed horse teeth, first at Marcus Arrius Julianus and then at the crowd, as though to say,
I got the best of this situation after all
.

He pushed the boy, still bound, in the direction of his new master.

The crowd did not know what to make of this, but gossip would not be stopped for lack of information. As the story was told and retold in every tavern, the motive of this strange scene was attributed to lust, in spite of the fact that Marcus Arrius Julianus was one of the few aristocrats of whom no stories whatever filtered down of a passion for young boys.

“Take this slave to the house,” a bewildered Endymion heard his new master say briskly to the freedman. “Prepare him and give him clean clothes.”

On the following day Endymion, dressed in a tunic of finest linen, paced restively in the writing room of the senatorial mansion of Marcus Arrius Julianus. He felt wary as a sentinel. As he waited for the great man to find a moment to speak to him, he examined the room in a lucid daze. Atop a cypress writing table was a silver wine service; he realized with dismay that each of its heavy, masterfully crafted cups cost three times what he himself was worth. But the fact that he recognized the cups’ bas-relief as the death of Dido from the
Aeneid
gave him a fleeting sense of belonging. Behind the table was a water clock in milky aquamarine glass plated with gold.
How elegantly the wealthy mark the hour—a slave need know only day and night.
Everywhere was a profusion of books, stuffed hurriedly into niches in the wall, or allowed to spill onto the floor with extravagant carelessness. He marveled that he did not snatch up those nearest and begin greedily reading, and would have liked to believe he had attained some of the philosophers’ ability to control the passions, but his pitiless good sense told him that, in truth, the sharp unease he felt was dampening his lust for books.
What in the name of all-wise Minerva was wanted of him?

This great-house was a labyrinthine paradise of interlocking gardens and chill, skylit rooms splashed with iridescent panoramas of ancient days that alternated with dim, sumptuously padded chambers aglow with the low sheen of dark precious woods and gold, rooms crowded with the mysteries of smooth-worn family treasures, thrown casually together with a magically sculpted Aphrodite by Praxiteles or Skopas, or the priceless bronzes it was fashionable to collect in these times. This was an earthly Elysium teeming with all those things the true philosopher was not supposed to want. The mansion was built into the side of the Esquiline Hill; from the balcony of the writing room he could see the reeking Subura far below—the steady flow of people and animals in its principal street put him in mind of a dirty, sluggish river. He wondered once if he had been lifted up to the sky in some cruel jest of the gods; soon they would tire of this sport and drop him back into the slime.

When at the fourth hour of morning Marcus Arrius Julianus entered at last, Endymion rose quickly from his place, grimly ready to face whatever might come. He bowed, uttering the word
“Clarissimus”
with boyish dignity.

“Raise yourself up. You bow too low for a free man.”

“You are freeing me? Why?”

The Senator’s face appeared more wan and worn in the thin glare of the morning light. He signaled to the boy to sit, and then he settled himself facing him, moving ponderously as if his leg gave him pain.

“No, I am not freeing you,” he said patiently. “I cannot
free you, because you were never a slave. I went through that stage-act of buying you only to divert the crowd from the truth. I know of but one way to tell you this, and that is to tell you directly. But first, take a good draught of this.”

He took up a flagon, poured unwatered wine into one of the weighty silver cups, then held it out to the boy. Endymion hesitated a moment, his mind unsettled with questions, then he took it. The contents were so strikingly superior to any wine he had ever tasted—the most delicate fruit of autumn, he thought, musky silk—that he doubted at first that it
was
wine.

Marcus Arrius Julianus seized him with gentle, demanding eyes.

“You are my son.”