The Scorpion God: Three Short Novels (12 page)

The curtains between the loggia and the rest of the villa were no defence against the eunuch’s voice. His discourse on passion was understandably but divinely impersonal. It twisted and soared, it punched the third part of a tone suggestive of a whole man’s agony, it broke into a controlled wobble, dived, panted neatly in syncopation for breath. The young man who stood against one of the pillars of the loggia continued to roll his head from side to side. There were furrows in his forehead as deep as youth could make them and his eyelids were not screwed up but lowered as if they were a weary and unendurable weight. Beyond and below him the garden was overwhelmed with sunset. A glow, impersonal as the eunuch voice, lay over him, but even so it was possible to see that he was exquisite to look at, tall, red-haired and gentle. His lips fluttered and a sigh came through them.

The old man who sat so restfully by the other pillar of the loggia looked up from his work.

“Mamillius.”

Marnillius shrugged inside his toga but did not open his eyes. The old man watched him for a while. The expression on his face was difficult to read, for the sunlight was reflected from the stone pavement and lit him upside down so that the nose was blunted and an artificial benevolence lay about the mouth. There might have been a worried smile under it. He raised his voice a little.

“Let him sing again.”

Three notes of a harp, tonic, sub-dominant, dominant, foundations of the universe. The voice rose and the sun continued to sink, with remote and unimpassioned certainty. Mamillius winced, the old man gestured with his left hand and the voice ceased as if he had turned it off.

“Come! Tell me what is the matter.”

Mamillius opened his eyes. He turned his head sideways and looked down at the gardens, level after declining level of lawn that yew, cypress and juniper shadowed and formalized, looked listlessly at the last level of all, the glittering sea.

“You would not understand.”

The old man crossed his sandalled feet on the footstool and leaned back. He put the tips of his fingers together and an amethyst ring sparkled on one of them. The sunset dyed his toga more gorgeously than the Syrians could manage and the broad, purple fringe looked black.

“Understanding is my business. After all, I am your grandfather, even though you are not from the main trunk of the imperial tree. Tell me what is the matter.”

“Time.”

The old man nodded gravely.

“Time slips through our fingers like water. We gape in astonishment to see how little is left.”

Mamillius had shut his eyes, the furrows were back and he had begun to roll his head against the pillar again.

“Time stands still. There is eternity between a sleep and a sleep. I cannot endure the length of living.”

The old man considered for a moment. He put one hand into a basket at his right, took out a paper, glanced at it and threw it into a basket on his left. Much work by many expert hands had gone to giving him the air of clean distinction he cut even before that garden and in that light. He was perfected by art, from the gleaming scalp under the scanty white hair to the tips of the tended toes.

“Millions of people must think that the Emperor’s grandson—even one on the left-hand side—is utterly happy.”

“I have run through the sources of happiness.”

The Emperor made a sudden noise that might have been the beginnings of a shout of laughter if it had not ended in a fit of coughing and a nose-blow in the Roman manner. He turned to his papers again.

“An hour ago you were going to help me with these petitions.”

“That was before I had begun to read them. Does the whole world think of nothing but cadging favours?”

A nightingale flitted across the garden, came to rest in the dark side of a cypress and tried over a few notes.

“Write some more of your exquisite verses. I particularly liked the ones to be inscribed on an eggshell. They appealed to the gastronome in me.”

“I found someone had done it before. I shall not write again.”

Then for a while they were silent, prepared to listen to the nightingale: but as if she were conscious of the too-distinguished audience she gave up and flew away.

Mamillius shook out his toga.

“Mourning Itys all these years. What passionate unintelligence!”

“Try the other arts.”

“Declamation? Gastronomy?”

“You are too shy for the one and too young for the other.”

“I thought you applauded my interest in cooking.”

“You talk, Mamillius, but you do not understand. Gastronomy is not the pleasure of youth but the evocation of it.”

“The Father of his Country is pleased to be obscure. And I am still bored.”

“If you were not so wonderfully transparent I should prescribe senna.”

“I am distressingly regular.”

“A woman?”

“I hope I am more civilized than that.”

This time the Emperor was unable to stop himself. He tried to untwist the laughter out of his face but it convulsed his body instead. He gave up and laughed till the tears jerked out of his eyes. The colour in his grandson’s face deepened, caught up the sunset and passed it.

“Am I so funny?”

The Emperor wiped his cheeks.

“I am sorry. I wonder if you will understand that part of my exasperated affection for you is rooted in your very—Mamillius, you are so desperately up-to-date that you dare not enjoy yourself for fear of being thought old-fashioned. If you could only see the world through my regretful and fading eyes!”

“The trouble is, grandfather, I do not even want to. There is nothing new under the sun. Everything has been invented, everything has been written. Time has had a stop.”

The Emperor tossed another paper into his basket.

“Have you ever heard of China?”

“No.”

“I must have heard of China twenty years ago. An island, I thought, beyond India. Since then, odd fragments of information have filtered through to me. Do you know, Mamillius,
China
is an Empire bigger than our own?”

“That is nonsense. A contradiction in nature.”

“But true, none the less. I sometimes fall into a daze of wonder as I imagine this ball of earth held, as it were, in two hands—one light brown and the other, according to my information, jaundice yellow. Perhaps at last man will be confronted with his long-lost twin as in that comedy.”

“Travellers’ tales.”

“I try to prove to you how vast and wonderful life is.”

“Do you suggest that I should go exploring?”

“You could not go by sea and it would take ten years by track or river if the Arimaspians would let you. Stay home and amuse an old man who grows lonely.”

“Thank you for allowing me to be your fool.”

“Boy,” said the Emperor strongly, “go and get mixed up in a good bloody battle.”

“I leave that sort of thing to your official heir. Posthumus is an insensitive bruiser. He can have all the battles he wants. Besides, a battle cheapens life and I find life cheap enough already.”

“Then the Father of his Country can do nothing for his own grandson.”

“I am tired of twiddling my fingers.”

The Emperor looked at him more closely than the remark seemed to warrant. “Have I been very foolish? Be careful, Mamillius. A condition of our unusual friendship is that you keep your fingers out of hot water. Go on twiddling them. I want you to have that long life even if in the end you die of boredom. Do not become ambitious.”

“I am not ambitious for power.’’

“Continue to convince Posthumus of that. Leave ruling to him. He likes it.”

Mamillius looked at the curtains, took a step forward and murmured to the Emperor.

“Yet you would prefer that I should inherit the purple fringe on your toga!”

The Emperor leaned forward and answered him urgently.

“If his agents heard you we should neither of us live a year. Never say such a thing again. It is an order.”

Mamillius returned to his pillar, while the Emperor took up another paper, held it in the sunset-glow and tossed it aside. For a time there was silence between them. The nightingale, assured of darkness and privacy, returned to the cypress and her song. The Emperor spoke softly at last.

“Go down the steps, cross the lawn that fills this coombe so neatly, pick your way past the lily-pond and enter the cliff-tunnel. After a hundred paces you will stand on the harbour quay——”

“I know the neighbourhood well enough.”

“You will not be able to see much by the time you get there; but say to yourself, ‘Here, shielded from the sea by the two quays are a hundred ships, a thousand houses, ten thousand people. And every one would give his ears to be the bastard but favourite grandson of the Emperor’.”

“Warehouses, taverns, brothels. Tar, oil, bilges, dung, sweat.”

“You dislike humanity.”

“And you?”

“I accept it.”

“I avoid it.”

“We must get Posthumus to allow you a governorship. Egypt?”

“Greece, if I must.”

“Booked, I am afraid,” said the Emperor regretfully. “There is even a waiting list.”

“Egypt, then.”

“A part of Egypt. If you go, Mamillius, it will be for your own sake. You would find nothing of me on your return but ashes and a monument or two. Be happy then, if only to cheer an ageing civil servant.”

“What has Egypt to make me happy? There is nothing new, even out of Africa.”

The Emperor unrolled another paper, glanced at it, smiled, then allowed himself to laugh.

“Here is something new for you. They are two of your prospective subjects. You had better see them.”

Listlessly Mamillius accepted the paper, stood with his back to the Emperor and held it up to the light. He let go the end and glanced over his shoulder, grinning, as the paper rolled itself up. He turned and they laughed in each other’s eyes. The Emperor laughed, enjoying himself, younger, delighted. Mamillius was suddenly younger, his laugh uncertain in pitch.

“He wants to play boats with Caesar.”

So they laughed together under the song of the nightingale. The Emperor was the first to compose himself to stillness. He nodded towards the curtains. Mamillius went towards them, pulled one aside and spoke in a coldly formal voice.

“The Emperor will see the petitioners Phanocles and Euphrosyne.”

Then he was back by the pillar and they were nodding and grinning at each other conspiratorially.

But Caesar could not be approached as though he were no more than a man. A fat secretary came through the curtains, sank on one knee and rested the tablets on the other. With a stamp and clank a soldier in full armour marched into the loggia. He came to attention behind the Emperor and a little to one side, rasped out a sword and flashed it upright. There were voices whispering behind the curtain and two slaves drew them back. Someone struck a staff on stone paving.

“The Emperor permits you to approach him.”

A man came through the curtain and a woman followed him carrying a burden. The slaves dropped the curtain and the man stood for a moment, perhaps dazzled by the sunset so that they had a moment or two to inspect him. He wore a light-coloured tunic and over that a long green cloak. His dark hair and beard were wild, ruffled either by the wind of his own approach or by some exterior insolence of weather that was not permitted to invade the Emperor’s seclusion. The cloak was threadbare, patched and dusty. No one had taken care of his hands and feet. His face was lumpy, haphazard and to be accepted as nothing more than the front of a head.

The woman who had followed him shrank aside to the shadowy corner that seemed her natural place. She was little but a pillar of drapery, for a veil was over her head and caught loosely across her face. She stood sideways to the men and bowed her head over the bundle she carried. The instep lifted the long robe so that it revealed a sandal and four inches of modelled foot. The soldier made no sign behind his sword: only his eyes swivelling sideways raked her, assessing, expertly removing the wrappings, judging with the intuitive skill of long practice, from the few hints she allowed him, the woman who lay beneath. He saw a hand half-hidden, the rounded shape of a knee beneath the fabric. His eyes returned to their divided stare on either side of the sword. His lips pursed and rounded. Breathed through at a more propitious time and place they would have whistled.

Suspecting this transaction, the Emperor glanced quickly behind him. The soldier’s eyes stared straight ahead. It was impossible to believe that they had ever moved or would ever move again. The Emperor glanced at Mamillius.

He was watching the woman sideways, his eyes, swivelling, raked her, removing the wrappings, judging with the intuitive and boundless optimism of youth the woman who lay beneath.