Commodus Read online

  Galen bent over the bed. His hands went to the boy’s neck, then up to his ears, around the back, behind them, and then, with a sigh of regret, he turned Annius’ head. I peered out from beside Commodus, where I had a fairly clear view. I could see the lump even from this far back, which meant it must have been large and pronounced. I had known the prince was doomed. Now it seemed revealed how.

  ‘It is a tumour, Majesty,’ Galen said. ‘I once saw a similar rapid progression in a man in Pergamon. There will have been signs earlier if only you had known to look for them. A little memory loss, perhaps. A fall here and there. Nausea.’

  And thinking back over the past month, I realised those signs had always been there but had been dismissed as unimportant. That day on the high wall when he teetered and had been grabbed by Cleander, perhaps even that had been the work of this ill. He could have been saved, had we but known.

  ‘Can you heal him?’ the emperor asked. His voice was steady and calm, though his eyes were wide, frightened. He was maintaining his composure for the benefit of his wife and other children, but even I could read a state of near-panic beneath that veneer.

  ‘I cannot say for certain, Majesty. Had I got to him a month ago, I would be inclined to say yes. Even days ago would have been better. But it is advanced, and the effects are critical. Even if he lives, he may now be permanently affected. He might be blind, or unable to hear. He might have no balance. But all that is moot, Majesty, as I would give at best even wagers as to whether he will make it through surgery, let alone the night.’

  ‘Do it, Galen,’ the emperor said.

  The physician went to work. The non-crucial guests departed politely, and the imperial family and their close associates remained in that wing of the villa, waiting nervously. As had so often happened throughout our youth, my proximity to Commodus secured my place among them. The prince and I sat for a while in the garden outside, discussing our fears where no adult could overhear. Neither of us held out the slightest hope for Annius’ survival.

  After some two hours, Galen emerged, covered with blood. Annius still breathed. The tumour was gone. The imperial family poured out their thanks and relief, but Galen held up a warning hand. He did not believe he had got to it in time. The surgery had been hard and bloody work, and he was far from convinced that Annius would last ’til dawn.

  That night, Commodus prayed to Aesculapius for hours. He bade me join him, but I prayed instead to God, and we both beseeched the powers in our own way that Annius would make it.

  God does not look favourably upon pagans, though. And Aesculapius is, in my mother’s words, one of the Devil’s many faces.

  Annius died in the small hours of the morning, and with him went the last of the shining flames in Commodus’ heart.

  The year of sorrow had claimed another Antonine prince.

  PART TWO

  A YOUNG HERCULES

  ‘Lo! he stands erect and laughs at the danger, and sweeping together the hostile forces he puts them in his lion skin’

  – Philostratus: Imagines, trans. Fairbanks, 1931

  VII

  A GILDED CAGE

  ad 170

  Time rolled on after that horrible season in Praeneste, and I saw little of my prince in the ensuing months. With the loss of another son, the emperor threw every resource and every ounce of his spirit into Commodus, trying to help him grow strong and swift and keep him safe, preparing him for what was to come. Now nine years old, the prince was all but a man already. He had always been advanced and precocious, after all. And partially in an effort to keep the prince’s mind off that last disastrous death, his father pushed him endlessly into preparations for rule. He was constantly at study; taught grammar and rhetoric, economics and administration.

  On the rare occasions I saw him, my heart broke all over again. While his family could see only a son focused on his tasks and advancing with a stolid manner, I could see that his calm was but a shell. Inside, all was turmoil, still. He was paler than he should be, and he looked permanently tired, his eyes having acquired a quick, dancing, haunted aspect, as though perpetually seeing Fulvus, Verus and Annius out of the corner of his eye. His father did not know how to help him and assumed he would heal from this heartbreak in time. He was right, as it turned out, though the prince’s journey back from Hades was torture. Commodus, ever a loving son, hid the worst of what he was going through from his parents and suffered alone.

  I could not help.

  After Annius’ death, Lucilla made sure that Mother was sent back to the Palatine, and I was given to Quadratus like chattel the day my first period ended and I was fit to be with a man. My new master had a rich town house on the Caelian Hill and we settled in there for a time, a gilded cage for the former consul and his pretty new mistress.

  I never liked Quadratus, and posterity bears out my feelings. My situation might have been a boon to some of my status, who would be willing to sell their womanhood for baubles and pretty flowers. For me, it was sexual slavery, pure and simple.

  I had spent years now overhearing tales of the hair-raising carnal exploits of several rather forceful women of the Antonine court, though I had assumed them to be exaggerating. When Quadratus first came to me, he was full of lust and joy for the acquisition of his new plaything after so many months of desire. He entered my room like a conquering general seeking his prize and tore my clothes from me.

  My every instinct was to scream and to fight. I was only just out of childhood and this animal who had cast such a shadow over me for so long seemed determined to ruin me. I cannot say why, but for some reason, instead of reacting with anger or panic, I simply stood, silent and still amid the tatters of my clothes. He seemed oddly taken aback, since his prey was not playing the game. With a grunt, he pushed me back, down onto the bed amid sheets of silk and linen that had cost more than my entire childhood home had been worth.

  My first time was painful, I will not deny, but it was no more painful than the descriptions I have heard from other girls. In fact, it was less painful than I expected. And with my seeming compliance, he had not needed to grasp and pull and force, and my flesh escaped bruising. It did not last long, and when it was over, we lay amid the bloodstained sheets. His fingers sought my hair, entwining in the dark waves almost in a caress, almost lovingly. It felt like a successful thief caressing his ill-gotten wares. It was at once tender and sickening. If I’d not hated him before, I certainly did then. And yet, through the unpleasantness, it seemed that I had unwittingly tamed the beast.

  I suspect the encounter, and Quadratus’ reaction to it, surprised him as much as it did I, for he did not come to me again for many days, yet had mirrors and jewellery provided in my room, inviting me to sit on the balcony with him and drink wine. He acted, almost, the caring lover. I complied. I always complied. I never smiled, though, and the fact that he seemed to neither notice nor care says much about him.

  I was slipping into a false sense of security, and when he came to me next, he did little to damage that notion. He came gently and treated me with seeming care, though even his touch made me sick.

  At first, I had been wary, but, once I realised that there was nothing to fear from the act of congress, I realised something: I had an advantage. Quadratus wanted me, but he wanted me to take the lead sometimes, too. I began to relive some of the less outlandish stories I remembered from the women at court. Within a few months of arriving on the Caelian, I knew how I could control Quadratus. I still hated every moment, and my flesh crawled at the mere sound of his voice, but pushing through my fear and my hatred, I decided even early on that I would not be a victim, not while I had strength and will. It was then, I think, I realised that even as a concubine I could wield power. My body and spirit were two of the strongest weapons in my array.

  His son was forbidden from touching me. I suspect that initially Quadratus might have been inclined to share his new plaything p
urely for the sinful fun of further degrading me, but the way things had changed between us, and the way I felt he now needed me rather than merely desiring me, drove him to keep me all for himself. From the first time Quadratus found his adoptive heir pawing at me in a corridor, the invective he used made me flinch. I belonged to Quadratus, and he would not have even his son interfere. In fact, the lad was quickly sent to serve out a military tribunate and I only saw him infrequently after that.

  I had time and freedom unparalleled thus far in my span. Though Quadratus lusted after me and I was his, my status as a pleb was poor enough that the last thing he wanted was to parade me around in front of his noble friends and acquaintances, so I was spared too much exposure in public places. I was his creature – and occasionally he was mine now, had he but realised it – but he was surprisingly equitable. When he wanted me, he came to me, but most of the time he kept himself to himself and I found that I was able to live much of my life however I pleased, as long as I was in the house when he wanted me. I had access to more money than I had ever seen and was given licence to spend it, which I did, as though it gushed from a pipe. I had my own slaves and a more spacious apartment than I had ever lived in.

  Some days I wondered whether this was how powerful women like Livia and Agrippina had secured their power in a world where their men were in theory omnipotent. Whatever the case, as I learned more and more about my body and about his, I gained ever more hold over the man who’d thought he would cage me. Directed to a certain market with an unsavoury reputation one morning, I managed to acquire a copy of Aristides’ Milesiaka, which considerably enhanced my knowledge of private skills and filled my sexual armoury with an array of dangerous new weapons to use in cowing my master. I spent much of my free time reading, and secreting such a work among my books was no troublesome chore.

  So I endured.

  What I found hard to endure was the enforced distance between Commodus and myself. Since the age of four I had lived in the prince’s palaces and villas, learned with him, played with him, suffered heartbreak with him. And now he was forced to survive on his own, and I was stuck with Quadratus and his domus, and with a supply of books and ready cash to keep me sane.

  Commodus and I were not the only ones to suffer in that season of crows, though. Lucilla entered bitterly into her marriage with Pompeianus, who seemed no more thrilled by the match than the former empress. Rome continued to suffer the plague, though through the work of Galen and other wise men the effects had been somewhat lessened. The emperor’s good friend Avidius Cassius was forced to take military action in Aegyptus to put down a revolt there, and once more the barbarians of the north, given heart by the emperors’ withdrawal from Aquileia, crossed the great river and massacred a Roman force near Carnuntum.

  The spring after Annius’ passing, the emperor announced, somewhat wearily, a new campaign in the north to put down the troublesome Marcomanni and their Germanic allies. The military was gathered, and the court prepared to move north. This time most of us would go, including the great general Pompeianus and his bitter wife, the emperor and empress, Commodus, and even Quadratus, who was granted a position in command, more through familial connection than talent, it turned out.

  At the beginning of the month of Junius, on a warm, bright morning, Marcus Aurelius himself, with Commodus at his shoulder, passed through the city with the Guard and to the great temple of Bellona in the Campus Martius. There, accompanied by the sacred fetiales, he cast the bloodstained spear into the patch of ground that signified enemy territory and officially declared war on the Marcomanni.

  So, by summer of the year of the Consulship of Clarus and Cornelius, one hundred and seventy years since Christ’s coming, the court and everyone I cared about left Rome for Pannonia.

  I was excited. Even though I was still to travel as Quadratus’ mistress, among his entourage, I would be close to my prince. But more: I was to see the empire. Remember that I had spent most of my life in the city of Rome, and the furthest afield I had been was to Praeneste, perhaps twenty miles from the city as a bird flies. I had never seen mountains, or plains, or the sea.

  While the legions moved across the Apenninus mountains and north, trudging along endless gravel roads like an iron caterpillar, the court instead travelled a few miles downriver to Ostia and took ship there. I had been excited at the prospect of the sea, but the reality was entirely different as we reached the great port of Rome and approached the grandest of the triremes that waited.

  The ship looked so stable and calm at the dockside that my concerns abated for a while, though I felt a lurch in my stomach that almost rose into my mouth as I stepped onto the plank to board. The sight of the wine-dark sea rolling fifteen feet beneath me with only a board to take me to safety was all too familiar and I was dragged eight years back to that dreadful night crossing a plank to the bathhouse as Rome drowned.

  Matters did not improve much when the sailors cast off and the ship pitched and bucked as it moved out into the current and the oarsmen began their work, falling into a rhythm to the piped music with a professional calm. In truth, it was one of the smoothest sailings in history, and certainly while we were still within Ostia’s great Portus harbour, but to me it felt horrifying. While others stood at the rail and drank it in, I panicked that we would capsize and I would be pulled down to the choking, cold depths. Eclectus, ever thoughtful and seeing my distress even if he knew not the cause, drew me over to the rail and began to point out places of interest in the hope of pulling me from my fears. All I could do was stare at the boundless, infinite stretch of water that lay ahead or look down the side of the ship at the white, churning water. The rail was not for me. I made hasty excuses and moved back to the very centre of the ship, as far from the water as I could manage, where I shook.

  That is not to say that I made a bad sailor. I was not ill like some of those on board, and the rolling of the deck beneath me did not unsettle me in itself. But the very sight of that much water made my courage shrivel inside and left me sweating out my fear. I tried to read to keep myself busy, but the motion of the ship made concentrating on the small text difficult in the extreme.

  I did not enjoy the journey from Ostia up the coast to Pisae, so much so that even Quadratus’ visits were less unbearable than usual, my disgust and loathing and fear focusing on him for a short while, rather than the endless deeps of the ocean. I was as relieved as I have ever been when we put in at Pisae at the end of our fourth day of travel.

  From there we set our course north-east, across the narrower stretches of the mountains that form Italia’s spine, making for Verona, which we reached on our seventeenth day.

  The fascination of seeing new terrain, new cities, lofty mountains and low marsh was tempered somewhat by the conditions that were clearly visible throughout the empire as we travelled. Plague was not confined to Rome itself, and the effects had been equally dreadful in the provinces. We saw innumerable farms that had simply been deserted and fallen into ruin, overgrown, their owners dead and no one willing to take on the property for fear of lingering disease. Whole villages were empty places, inhabited only by shades. And as a consequence of the depopulation, food was becoming scarce. The people we did see were usually hungry and miserable, begging at the roadside. The recent wars had cost Rome dearly, too. Poverty was everywhere, manifested in each hollowed cheek and every dead eye.

  Near Verona we converged with the bulk of the army that had been gathered to chastise the tribes, and I was astounded. I had only ever seen the Praetorians and the men of the Urban Cohorts in Rome, uniformly equipped, neat and very traditional. My image of the armies of Rome was simply an expansion of the units with which I was familiar. The truth was far from that. The assembled mass was so varied and exotic, from African cavalry to Syrian archers, to Gallic cohorts, to Iberian slingers and Thracian spear-men. And, it transpired, there was even more unusual to be found in that mass if one only pried. The shortage of man
power following the plague had left the emperor and his generals in dire need of new sources of men. Consequently, there were units of sailors here, looking wholly uncomfortable armed like legionaries and on dry, immobile land. There was even a legion formed of gladiators. I half expected to find Commodus near them, given his fascination with the sport, but he was kept busy by his father and the imperial court. He was, after all, the heir to the throne and old enough now to witness battle, if not to actively participate.

  The idea of Commodus in battle perturbed me. Not that I worried about his ability or courage, of course. He had ever been a boy ready for a fight or a match, and his strength was surprising even as a youngster, like his revered Hercules. No. I feared for him in battle for, unlike his father, I knew that he was still that lost and hollow shell of a boy, reeling after so much death and loss, a solid smile painted on his face for the court. I remembered his talk of bereavement and of what it would feel like to die. And I shivered at the thought of how easy it might be for him to find out in Pannonia.

  In equal parts marvelling at the grandness of the empire and the army that moved through it and suffering great dismay at the condition in which much of the land lay, we moved north once more through the Carnic Alpes and on to Pannonia.

  I began to learn fragments of military thinking and reasoning purely through proximity to the commanders during that time, and I expanded on that where I could with dips into the rather unfamiliar military texts that were available among the officers and their households. The emperor had thought to be engaged with the enemy before now. Reports had detailed attacks by the Marcomanni and allied tribes down almost as far as Aquileia once more. And everywhere we went, we found evidence that those attacks had occurred, yet no barbarians. It was always an aftermath, and usually long since suffered. They had been there and killed, stolen and burned, but they had gone and the populace was now rebuilding. The army began to send out scout units to locate any tribal warbands, and they returned each day after no contact with the enemy and with ever-increasing reports of destruction long since visited, though sometimes it was hard to tell whether it had been the Marcomanni who had ruined the region, or simply plague, hunger and poverty.