Commodus Read online

  I was definitely feeling more relaxed. My earlier fears seemed so far-fetched now. All those I mistrusted were in the pulvinar under the watchful eye of the Praetorians. White-clad soldiers seemed to line every passageway and stand in every arch. It was simply ridiculous to think that someone might do something today.

  I was enjoying the sight of the gladiators finishing their parade, seen through one of the arches that opened onto the seating, when a fanfare announced the emperor’s arrival. I smiled. Just in time. Turning my eyes from the last of the parade, I peered down the dimly lit tunnel, past the ranks of Praetorians, to see movement at the entrance to the amphitheatre. The corridors in the place had swiftly filled with desperate spectators hoping to catch a glimpse of the young emperor. I could see Praetorians holding them back and occasionally applying necessary force to prevent them breaking out into the open. The Guard were good. They knew exactly what they were doing. The noise rose, crescendoing both inside the arena and out, the former as the opening parade finished and the gladiators disappeared to prepare for the afternoon’s matches, the latter from the crowds adoring their emperor.

  Noise and a press of humanity, all surrounding the calm, professional soldiers in white.

  I saw Commodus at last, striding down the clear passage, waving to the mass of spectators on either side. At his shoulder was a Praetorian officer, with Saoterus, Cleander, Eclectus and a dozen other notables following on, yet more of the ever-present Praetorians bringing up the rear.

  I eased back, ready to retreat up the stairs ahead of the emperor, preparing to settle in for the day’s events, and then I saw it. Just an odd face in the crowd that somehow grabbed my attention. I peered into the dim light to be sure.

  Slightly ahead of Commodus, the Praetorian lines at the side were struggling to hold back the excited mass in the side passages, and where the cordon of white-clad men bulged, I could see a familiar face. It was the boy we had seen as we entered the place, the one who reminded me so of Pompeianus. A sickening feeling welled in the pit of my stomach, and I realised now how well founded my fears had been. Those bastards in the pulvinar didn’t have to lie in wait. They had someone to do it for them. Though there were Praetorians everywhere, the emperor was exposed, in the open. It would only take one swift blow. Yes, the boy would die in a heartbeat, but by then it would be too late. Commodus would be lying on the stone flags, bleeding his last, like Caesar before him.

  I yelled a warning. I can’t remember what I shouted, but it was urgent and loud. Unfortunately, fifty thousand people all around me were also shouting urgently and loudly.

  Commodus strode forward, oblivious, sharing a joke with the Praetorian officer.

  The young man suddenly burst through the cordon of white-clad soldiers, ducking beneath grasping hands. He was running now, straight for Commodus, and as he ran his hand tore a blade from his voluminous tunic. I stared in horror. He had the jump on everyone. No one would be able to react before he struck.

  To my surprise, the young man pulled himself up in front of the shocked emperor, gladius raised to strike, and bellowed in a voice that cut through the sound of a thousand indrawn breaths, ‘See what the senate sends for tyrants!’

  His blade wavered for just a moment and then began its descent. Commodus threw himself backwards, but the blade nicked his raised forearm. Thus, he escaped the deadly initial blow: the lad had been foolish enough to delay his attack to deliver a message. The idiot. Soldiers were running to defend the emperor. A Praetorian spear came from somewhere, gleaming in the lamplight, and struck the would-be assassin in the shoulder of his sword arm, sending him spinning in agony and dropping to the floor as his weapon clattered off across stone.

  The young man shrieked and coughed up a gout of blood, struggling to rise. My fears over the loyalty of the Praetorian officer dissolved in an instant as the man took charge, sending his soldiers this way and that, sealing the area and driving all spectators back. Limbs were broken and heads bashed in an attempt to clear the corridor, but no one cared. The emperor’s safety was paramount.

  Commodus was shaken but unwounded, apart from the scored red line across his arm.

  The lad on the floor was in more pain, though. He writhed, bleeding, trying to get to his sword. Two Praetorians reached down and grasped him, pinning his arms and lifting him upright painfully, making him screech anew.

  I could see shock and anger both in Commodus’ face as he stepped forward. There was a brief exchange between Commodus, his would-be killer, the Praetorian officer and a few of his men, though with the sudden surge of shocked noise from the crowd and the bellowing of soldiers trying to clear the passageways, I could not make out the words. I stared as the emperor took the boy’s sword and examined it with a professional eye, then I jumped as Commodus suddenly slammed the blade into the lad’s chest, twisting it this way and that, then releasing the hilt to step back, leaving the weapon in place.

  The boy collapsed the moment the two Praetorians let go of him, blood pouring out onto the flags, filling the gaps between the stones first, then thickening into a sea of crimson around the dying attacker. I stared. I’d not been expecting such a thing, though I probably should have, given both what he had tried to do and Commodus’ martial nature. This was the same Commodus who had ridden back from Marcomannia with a king’s head swinging from his saddle, after all.

  It took only moments for the Praetorians to clear the way, remove the body and put everything right. I could see a brief argument going on between the emperor and his officer, and I could imagine it: the Praetorian insistent that the emperor be escorted back to the safety of the palace, Commodus refusing, determined instead on continuing with the day for his public.

  He resumed his climb towards the imperial box, ashen-faced Saoterus, Cleander and Eclectus with him, white-robed soldiers moving ahead and following on, watching every dark corner. Two of the Praetorians reached me where I stood ahead and made to move me out of the way, but Commodus waved them aside.

  ‘Marcia?’

  ‘I wanted . . . I wanted to see you arrive, Majesty.’ I felt frozen to the core, gooseflesh prickling. I appeared to be in shock far more than he, though I suspected that calm and businesslike face to be one of the masks he wore when he needed to hide his true emotions.

  ‘Come on. The games will start soon.’

  My eyes widened. ‘No. You can’t. Not the pulvinar. This wasn’t just the boy . . .’

  He smiled easily. ‘I know. Lucilla. Quadratus. The Quintilii. Everyone you warned me about. Perennis just confirmed it all from his agents. The Praetorians know them all.’

  ‘If they were that well informed, how did this happen?’

  The emperor shrugged. ‘Sometimes we are in the hands of the gods, Marcia. All we can do is work with what they provide. The fact remains that I am alive and well, and my assassin is dead. Now come, we have games to watch.’

  We entered the pulvinar, where we settled in for one of the weirdest days of my life. The ring of conspirators who had meant to murder the emperor in the tunnels below sat alongside us and watched the games in a polite, tense silence. We knew they were guilty, and so did they. They must have had at least a suspicion that we knew, and I believe that is why Commodus had us sit calmly through the day’s proceedings. It was a small, subtle flash of revenge to make them sweat through the whole event.

  When the closing ceremony finished at the end of the day and the imperial box opened for us all to depart, only then was Commodus’ displeasure made manifest. Quadratus and Lucilla were seized by the Praetorians and detained, as were three others, though Pompeianus and Fadilla were not among them, which relieved me. I liked both, and neither had been potential conspirators on my list, even though Pompeianus naturally lived in his wife’s villa.

  I observed the conspirators being bundled away with mixed feelings. I had never liked Lucilla or Quadratus, and they deserved everything they would
get for attempting to kill the emperor, and yet that part of me that had been weaned on a diet of understanding and forgiveness rebelled a little.

  ‘What will happen to them?’ I said, quietly.

  ‘Death,’ interrupted that Praetorian prefect with a stony face as his men led the prisoners away.

  ‘Exile, I think,’ corrected Commodus carefully. ‘Remember that these are my family.’

  The prefect – Perennis, his name was – gave his emperor a black look. ‘A sister’s blade is as deadly as any other. Exile is not enough, Majesty.’

  I was torn. In one way, it truly was. In another, it really was not.

  ‘Time will tell us what they deserve. Perennis, I need you to unpick this conspiracy down to the very threads now the deed is done and find out everything there is to find. Anyone involved is to be taken in, and we shall decide appropriate punishments in due course.’

  And so ended an attempt on the life of Commodus. I fell somewhat by the wayside after the games, uncertain what to do with myself. The emperor, clearly, had plenty to occupy him and, under the scrutiny and influence of Saoterus, Cleander, Eclectus and this prefect, he was immediately whisked off for the rest of the day.

  I really did not know even where to go. I was finally a free woman, of course, with Quadratus now permanently out of the scene, yet I was totally alone. The only home I had known, for a decade now, was not even mine, but the house of that very conspirator. I tried to wrap my mind around the concept of not being his mistress, not to be summoned at will and dismissed abruptly. Not to be beaten when something annoyed him. I was free. I had no home, no money, no job. But I was free, and I knew that Commodus would not see me starving and destitute. I wondered whether the domus on the Caelian would pass down to Quadratus’ equally unpleasant adopted son. If so, I would make sure to leave before he came anywhere near it. More likely, given what had happened, the house would be impounded by the palace and become imperial property. Once more that old quandary returned. Could I find myself close to Commodus? My heart begged yes, but my mind reminded me that there was a wife there to stand between us. I might have to find a way to scratch that particular itch before long.

  For the time being, I went back to the house on the Caelian Hill, and the staff treated it as only natural that I should return. I stayed there for a month, receiving occasional updates from Eclectus concerning progress on the Palatine, though the brutal reaction of the administration to the attempted assassination was well known even by the lowliest street urchin.

  Lucilla, her daughter and Quadratus’ sister were sent into disgraced exile on the island of Capri and the archaic villas of Tiberius. They were the lucky ones. The Quintilii brothers were arrested by Praetorians and dispatched, though rather more humanely than anyone expected, their property impounded by the palace. Salvius Julianus met a violent end at the tip of a Praetorian blade, though his cousin Didius was pardoned for any wrongdoing given that, apart from that one noted visit to the villa of the princess, he had apparently refused to be involved in the conspiracy any further and had argued against it. Half a dozen notables who I did not know by name were said to have met the edge of a blade for involvement, though there was a murmured belief among the nobility that the proscription lists that killed so many important people were largely compiled and approved by the Praetorian prefects and the palace freedmen.

  I could quite believe that.

  Norbanus, Paralius, Vitruvius Secundus, Vitrasia Faustina, Velius Rufus, Egnatius Capito. The list went on. Even the consuls Aemilius and Atilius went into exile. At least half of them were outspoken opponents of the emperor’s reliance upon freedmen, which is somewhat telling.

  The only punishment that I witnessed personally came the day after the games. The crowd that gathered to watch the end of Quadratus, the emperor’s treasonous cousin, was almost as large and excited as the crowds at the games the day before.

  I may have hated the man, but even I, with every reason to wish him a humiliating death, felt my gorge rise as I watched from between the columns of the Temple of Concord. Half a dozen Praetorians appeared at the top of the infamous Gemonian Stairs, where their fellows had kept the entire place free of citizens. The mass of observers had gathered in the forum below or, like me, on the steps of temples where the view was better.

  Quadratus was ruined. He had spent the night and the morning in the cellars below the Palatine with some very unfriendly professionals, who had prised out of him every last detail of the conspiracy. He was tortured and abused, a mere mockery of a human, now. His flesh was cut, burned, sloughed away. He had been left one eye with which to watch, terrified, his fate. His ears were gone, his fingers trimmed down. His body was naked, his flesh purple and blue, beaten and torn. In truth, he had been hurt beyond all reason and was probably now praying to his gods for death, a collection of expertly tied ropes the only thing that held him up in a parody of a whole man.

  The Praetorian centurion Adrastus, the man who commanded the Palatine’s executioners, stepped forward and bellowed out the traditional accusations, convictions and sentences for a citizen who committed treason against his emperor, though I heard only staccato bursts over the general buzz of the blood-hungry crowd.

  I forced myself not to turn away as the executioner produced his sword. This was a man who had not only tried to assassinate his emperor, but a man who had enslaved, whored and abused me throughout our association. A man with no moral fibre, whom I owed nothing but disdain. I had watched that governor in Alexandria go under the sword like a true Roman, and his quiet nobility had earned him a razor-sharp blade. Quadratus was no such man. Not even a shadow of Romanitas fell upon him, and I knew that the sword would have been kept suitably blunt for him. That belief was borne out as the executioner swung and the first blow only cut deep into the side of the victim’s neck, breaking bones and snapping tendons. Quadratus screamed then. He might have thought he had reached the pinnacle of his pain. He had been wrong. It took six blows in all to remove the head, and Quadratus must have felt every one, each delivered with agonising slowness.

  The head was cast down the stairs, where it bounced numerous times with dull clonks, before vanishing into the crowd below. Moments later, it was raised in triumph by some grisly spectator, a souvenir of the day. The rest of the body was then hurled out down the steps, where it bounced and slithered to a halt perhaps a third of the way down.

  Their task complete, the Praetorians withdrew and their cordon collapsed, the crowd surging with a roar up the steps to pull and dismember Quadratus’ remains, each hoping to take some souvenir of the day. I turned and left them to it. I was becoming inured to such vile things, but at least Quadratus had deserved his fate.

  I did see Commodus occasionally after that, while the other sentences were being announced and carried out, and I noted with relief that he seemed to have remained blessedly free of the black moods that had beset his youth. Perhaps it was because this was no loss of a loved one, but more a cleansing fire clearing out the chaff that had accumulated around him. He and Lucilla had never been particularly cordial, and he held Quadratus in much the same low regard as I.

  Finally, I received a message from my friend in the palace that the Caelian house was to be cleared. Rooms had been made available for me on the Palatine. I was to have my own apartment in the palace for the first time since I had been a girl. And with that I found myself confronting something I had buried for a long time and had not been able to face since that day in the arena. I was free. I had been kept from the man that I loved partially by my tie to Quadratus, but now that tie was severed. There was still the somewhat troublesome obstacle of Bruttia Crispina, of course. I wanted Commodus, I realised, as much as ever I had, but it had now become clear to me that I could not share him, even if I could never be an empress. Still, if there were a way to remove Bruttia from the picture, it would be easier to find it on the Palatine. And when I sometimes felt the needle of g
uilt in even thinking about how to deal with that pretty little empress, I simply reminded myself of her words back in Vindobona:

  ‘Stay away from my husband, Marcia Ceionia. You may have known him all his life, but you are just a pleb, and an ambitious one, I think. He is mine.’

  The prospect of being close to my golden prince again made me inordinately happy, and I reached the imperial palace one bright, sunny morning with a cart and a handful of slaves following on bringing all my worldly goods. In truth, and against every Christian value that had been drummed into me as a child, I had spent days going through Quadratus’ house like a swarm of locusts, swiping anything I liked or thought might be worth holding on to and claiming it as my own. I could perhaps argue Christian charity in urging the slaves and servants to do the same.

  I arrived at the palace doors and was shown inside by some functionary I did not know. I was told that Eclectus attended the emperor and would be with me shortly, and left in a comfortable room in which I had not sat for over ten years. I leaned back, enjoying being in the palace once more. I could wait; Commodus was a busy man.

  The door to the chamber suddenly burst open as though a runaway cart had struck the far side, and the emperor emerged, his face puce with rage. I shrank back in my seat at the sight of such fury, and then remembered at the last moment to stand and bow appropriately. Commodus did not even notice me.

  ‘Fetch me Paternus!’ he bellowed, and Eclectus, appearing at his shoulder, white-faced, nodded and ran off. The emperor came to a halt, shaking. Another figure entered the room through that same door and I was surprised to see that it was Perennis, the Praetorian prefect. It was only the sight of his uniform that jogged my memory. Paternus. He was the other prefect, the one who had been to visit Lucilla. I contemplated drawing attention to myself, but decided against it.