The Boat of Fate (12 page)
A dozen times in the week that followed I nearly confided in Marcus. Always a deeper insight prevented me. I couldn’t have stood his laughter, still less his ribaldry; what I owned was too precious for the light.
It was much more than a week before I saw her again. I crossed the river a dozen times, in stolen hours; a dozen times shinned up the tree by her father’s wall, praying to see her there. Once I dropped down into the grounds, ran to the summerhouse hoping to find a letter, a token even, some abandoned toy that might sing of her presence; but there was nothing. Save the dancing girls, shadows of her reality, watching from the pavement with their dark, alluring eyes. I took her a gift, greatly daring; a copy of part of the Aeneid, made by my own hand. I left the scroll where she was sure to see. On the second day it lay undisturbed; on the third it had gone. I suffered agonies; but on the fourth day she was there.
She ran to meet me when I peered over the wall. ‘Oh, Sergius,’ she said, ‘how happy you’ve made me; nobody ever gave me such a lovely book before, I knew when I saw it it must be from you. Do come down, just for a minute; though I can’t stay long. Mother has been very ill and fretful; she keeps me by her side the whole time now, which is why I haven’t been able to come before.’
To sit beside her, talking to her again, was strange; it was as if before she had had no real existence, as if she was a dream-thing formed in my own mind to which the Gods had given flesh. Her hair, once more, was bound by a fillet; once more it had escaped so that wisps hung darkly glowing, flicked and stroked her satin shoulders as she swung her head. I longed to touch her, feel even the pressure of her hand against mine where she sat beside me gripping the sill of the summerhouse, swinging her legs and laughing. Time passed quickly, too quickly; it seemed only minutes before she was running back as she had run before, leaving me to climb the wall and make my own way home. I watched from behind the bushes till she was out of sight; every movement she made was a precious thing to be loved and remembered, recaptured in the rich anonymity of night.
After that I took to walking the city again, endlessly, sometimes from dusk to dawn. It seemed I was truly alive for the first time; the heightening of my senses persisted, fed by my feverish imagination, so that the most commonplace sights and sounds became invested with new significance. The Pincian and the Gardens of Sallust, where lovers whispered and flitted in the night; the teeming, bawdy richness of the markets; the dead Summoenium where the vast inner wall winds through Rome, casting its shadow on the buildings that huddle at its foot; all these moved me to fresh wonder while the shade of Julia, floating at my side, thrilled and tortured with half-promised delights. Sometimes I would lounge at the city gates, watching the draymen drinking and gambling their days away, the coachmen waiting for trade. Sometimes I walked beside the Circus Maximus, seeing the prostitutes ply for hire, some coyly, some with shrillness and invective; none of them troubled me, and I was glad. The love I felt, that glowed with such fitful heat, would not suffer the defilement of common desire. So the days passed, declining into weeks, and the weeks to months. My life once more had purpose; though what that purpose was I perhaps didn’t closely enquire.
I had been working as a scribe in the Argiletum, to pay for my bed and food; I soon found the pittance I earned by my copying was no longer enough for my needs. I took to supplementing my earnings in Subura, in the all-night wine and pastry shops there; in what spare hours I had left I haunted the luxury shops of Saepta and the Forum Cuppedinis, searching for gifts for Julia. I left them regularly now, in the little summerhouse beyond the wall. I gave her bright Egyptian beads, a necklace of carnelian, a pectoral of electrum and gold. Perfumes and face-paint, anklets of twisted greenish glass, a new gold circlet for her hair; once, daringly, a robe of sheer linen that I hoped against hope she would let me see her wear. Sometimes she scolded me for my extravagance, but she always accepted eagerly what I brought. In time, the pace began to tell. I would rise red-eyed and bleary, stagger to my uncle’s office after a bare hour of sleep; several times Marcus queried my absences, once took me aside and demanded sternly to know the truth of my affairs. For the first time in my life I lied to him; I told him I was working to buy a commission in the Army, that he would yet have cause to look back on what he had taught me with pride. He grunted disbelievingly, but let the matter drop. A few nights later, as I set out for Julia’s home, he tried to follow me; but by that time I knew the city as well or better than he. I lost him in Subura, circled back to feast my eyes on the blank whitewalls that shielded everything I desired.
But every coin has two faces, and as time passed I found increasingly that my moods of fierce elation mingled with others of darkest despair. Never, my mind whispered, would I ever be worthy of Julia. I, who could barely afford a rabbit-hutch in Subura; how could I ever build her a summer palace on Capri? For that, and that only, seemed worthy of my love. Despite myself my imagination still ran free. I saw the lamps that would light the place, glowing against the summer blueness of sky and sea; the fountains with which I would fill it, the pools and scented trees. In the pools bright fish swam, great flowers opened their petals to the sun. Sometimes Julia bathed among them, languorously, attended by slaves scarcely less lovely than she; I saw her white breasts and arms, her hair as it trailed her shoulders, floated free like fronds of luscious fern. Sometimes I told her my fantasies, thrilling at the dream reflected in her eyes; sometimes the visions came to me at night, haunting and bewildering, mingled oppressively with the roar from the streets. Julia waded from the water, belly gleaming, while I turned and tossed in burning need, groaning aloud with despair, hard as the Pillars of Hercules and with no hope of relief, unless I performed that sacrifice to Venus that left me shaky and dull-eyed, turned love to a wilderness of self-contempt.
Sometimes Marcus swore at me in the dark. Once he threw his boots.
Julie herself was a capricious creature, full of opposites and contradictions. She explained them as inherent to her sex, the mystic ties women have with earth and moon. Sometimes she would appear as innocent and sweet as on that first day; at others she would taunt me with my lack of connections, asking me how I would ever set about becoming a famous man. Once she took my hand, demanding to know how I came by my disfiguring wound. I told her truthfully that I had got it in a duel. She mocked me, affecting not to believe, saying as a baby I had been trodden on by a horse; she pretended to see in the curving scar the very mark of its shoe. Next day, though, she seemed lost in admiration, demanding I tell her the tale again and again, marvelling at my prowess and bravery. ‘You’re quite obviously destined for great things, Sergius,’ she said. ‘You’ll evidently become a soldier, perhaps surpass even your patron.’ For little by little she had drawn out all the details of my life, including my boyhood love for Hadrian. She sighed, leaning back on the grass. ‘That’s the sort of man I always wanted to marry,’ she said. ‘A soldier, riding into Rome in triumph; who would let me share his chariot, wear golden armour and a sword. Be a soldier, Sergius, if only to please me.’ I basked under her praise; but when next we met she brought two simpering servant girls, who to my fury would not be driven away. Our intimacy had emboldened me; but when I asked her to dismiss them she turned on me furiously. ‘What a thing to say,’ she said scornfully. ‘Sergius, you must be mad. What are you hoping to do with me, when you get me on my own? To see how I’ve trusted you, as well; what a thing to say!’ The girls giggled behind their hands; I coloured furiously, tongue-tied with anger and shame.
At such times the despair would grip me more strongly than before. I would stamp beside the Tiber, face set, staring down at the endless yellow racing of the water. One day, perhaps soon now, a wealthy suitor would present himself at Julia’s gate; and there would be an end of hopes and dreams, of life itself. Sometimes it seemed I should fling myself into the river, have done then and there with loneliness and pain. It would be better for Julia, I told myself, to finish the thing for ever; I was certainly not fit to step within her shadow, my continued presence could only bring her grief. Perhaps too--I hated myself for the thought, but it would recur--perhaps she would keep a corner of her heart for me; stand and watch the river that had borne so many sons of Rome down rolling to the sea, and shed a tear for what had been and what could never be.
Spoken thus baldly my passion seems absurd, even to me; but when the mood is on me I can still relive the burning hopelessness of those years. Sometimes, Julia seemed to understand. Then she would suggest, with touching shyness, that all might not be really as black as I feared. Love, she would say, was the most important thing in the world; love, that conquers all barriers, sweeps aside all opposition to its schemes. If only love is strong enough, what may a man not achieve? Why, already I was becoming known in Rome; did I not speak with Senators on equal terms? I must work, tirelessly and unceasingly, and the future would resolve itself, that I would see. Occasionally the promise would be even more firm. Once, as I climbed my inevitable tree, she ran to me happily, calling and waving. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘today I’m a Spartan girl, the equal of any man. Don’t you think it’s lovely?’ And she turned to show me how her robe was open at the side, baring her hip. I moved towards her, impulsively, but she darted out of reach. ‘No,’ she said, ‘sit down and behave yourself, Sergius Paullus, or I shall go away. Go on, I mean it; sit down, exactly where you are, and promise not to move.’ I did as I was told, dumbly; and she crept forward, an inch at a time, till her mouth was a bare fraction from mine. My heart thundered; I saw her lips part; then her tongue was pushing, her teeth were jammed against mine.
‘I always kiss like that,’ she said demurely. She was sitting on the grass, weaving daisy chains; splitting the stalks with her long, filed nails, slipping them each through each. ‘Or I don’t kiss at all. You’re so sweet. Sergius, and have been such a friend to me. I hope you didn’t mind ...’
She wanted a baby leopard, or a cheetah to walk with her on a lead; but such as came to Rome were consigned to the arena, their prices above anything I could afford. I bought her a monkey instead, a tiny plaintive-faced thing, scarcely bigger than my hand. I left the cage on the sill of the summerhouse where she was sure to see. For two days after that I was kept too busy to cross the river. When I went again the cage still stood where I had left it, the little creature dead in the bottom of it. Round it on the grass the flower chains she had woven lay shrivelled and brown. I took the thing away and buried it, and said no word at all.
Looking back it seems strange how the great events that were shaping themselves in the world could leave me so unmoved, but perhaps that is always the way with men. I have heard folk claim the moon is a mighty plain, as broad as the entire earth; yet a leaf of a tree will hide it. So it is with us; the near obscures the far.
I lived in a frightened city. Rome was as she had always been, to the outward eye; bustling, noisy, vibrant with life. Grainships docked at her wharves, unloading their cargoes in golden streams; her aqueducts still delivered their countless gallons each day; men rose in hope, bedded in despair; and the arena roared. Emperor after Emperor, from the great Constantine onwards, had tried to forbid the games, but the people still would have their blood and bread. The Church railed, seeing in the amphitheatre the very playground of demons; but to no avail. Scaevola still thrust his live hand into the coals, Icarus took his fearsome flight, Orpheus bleated while his guts were ripped by bears. Under it all lay terror; the terror of a hectic, swirling life that soon must end. I see it now so clearly; how in the quiet watches of the night the eyes of the city turned north and east, where in a great ring stretched the Provinces that for years had guaranteed the safety of the hub of Empire. Not so many years before the plague from China, the Huns, had swept most of the Gothic tribes into confusion, so terrifying the survivors that the Thervingians, themselves no mean fighters, had begged to be granted asylum within the Empire. Valens, hard-pressed for manpower, had agreed, to the horror of most conservative thinkers; and an entire nation had been ferried to the imagined safety of Thrace. I remember my father remarking more than once that that single act could yet spell the doom of the West. For twenty years now the tribesmen had rested on Rome’s flank, uneasy and turbulent neighbours. They had risen once already; and at Adrianopolis Valens had paid for his short-sightedness with his life. The rot had been checked savagely. A pay parade was called, throughout the Army; after it, no Thervingian recruit remained alive. But the act, necessary though some thought it at the time, had left a smouldering residue of hate. Thrace was notoriously infertile; more than once Alaric, hereditary King of the Goths, had applied to move his people to Illyricum, and been refused. None knew when the banked fires might burst into fresh fury; and Romans at least had no illusions about the result. Under Theodosius the balance of power had been shifted radically eastward; Latium, rich and comparatively unguarded, could be invaded by a yelling horde if Alaric chose to swing his armies round the Adriatic.
Yet there were new forces in the world, new names on which to fasten old hopes. Foremost of them was Stilicho, barbarian and Magister Militum. He had, so the rumour went, accepted the hand of the Emperor’s niece, tying his fortunes to the fortunes of the West; and he was without doubt the finest soldier of the age. In Marcus’ view the fact that he was a Vandal showed the depths to which the Empire had sunk. I disagreed with him. Rome had always leaned heavily on satrapies and allies; if Stilicho, or any other barbarian, could ward off the dangers that beset her then he had at least my undivided support. In any case, as I have said, I troubled myself very little over international events. To me, the flicker of