B007IIXYQY EBOK (5 page)

“You won the race, my pretty Adonis—now come for your prize,” one of the prostitutes said in her rich, liquid voice, laughing as she struggled to lift him up.

“Is this a young rooster or capon?” another cried gaily. “Let’s see. Hold him there.”

“A hundred sesterces for the runaway!” came Grannus’ gasping shout, alarmingly close at hand.

Endymion struck and kicked and bit, struggling against plush arms, mischievous hands, cushioned hips and breasts, enveloped in their dusky scents of cinnamon and damp flesh, entangled in their jingling bracelets, until finally the prostitutes pushed him away in disgust, deciding he was too troublesome to bother with. When he looked back again, he saw the number of pursuers had grown to twenty and more, their ranks swelled by the increased reward: Anyone fleet of foot who was able to leave his work and give chase had done so. Their tunics were all tucked up to their waists and the people made way for them as they might for stampeding beasts. Their fierce shouts pierced his mind like knives. Endymion felt himself a wriggling piece of live bait, inciting the hungry city to snap its jaws round him, mangle him and swallow him down. Soon it would be as though he had never lived. Even the high tenements darkening the street seemed to lean close, squeezing him to hold him and slow him.

How quick, brutal, and fragile is life. You are born, you live a few years in wild hope, then you are dragged back into the night. You might have breathed on a little longer had you not dared think yourself a human creature instead of an engine of muscle and bone.

Suddenly, to his left—a twisting alley with steeply ascending steps, flanked by a tannery and a vendor of portrait busts. It led in the direction of the Old Forum, where fewer in the throng would know his face. He streaked into it, taking the steps five at a time, slipping on well-worn stone. He began to panic when after several turns the alley did not open into another street. Behind him the many feet of the bounty-hunters tapped furiously on the steps. Then the alley ended abruptly in a tenement’s high, windowless wall.

After a moment of plummeting into unfathomable terror, he saw a covered way half concealed in foliage, a narrow tunnel of ivy between the tenement and the back of a great-house.

He dashed into it and found himself suddenly amidst a gayer, gentler world of sculpted box hedges, perfumed air, and flower-edged walkways that were a homage to geometry. A serene pool mirrored a troupe of dancing bronze Pans. Again he felt the hand of death on his neck. He blundered into the private garden of a great mansion. Now he was truly trapped.

A doorkeeper, a leather-clad Thracian slave with cropped red hair, stepped in Endymion’s path and closed huge hands over his shoulders. “The Furies chasing you, boy?”

Endymion glanced swiftly about. In a shadowy peristyle, lit by the shivering flames of a row of wall sconces, were a series of pale paintings depicting the mysteries of Isis. He deduced from this that most likely this was a woman’s house, for Isis was the deity beloved of wealthy matrons.

“Message for the mistress,” he announced with all the confidence he could muster. “It’s most urgent. I ran the whole distance.”

The doorkeeper frowned, uncertainty in his face. “Is it her mother? How does she fare?”

“Not well. Not well at all.”
Success
, the boy thought; the man takes me for a slave-messenger. “In fact, she is dying!”

The footsteps of Grannus and his hungry pack reached the alley’s end.

“Good lad. Quickly, in there!” The Thracian indicated a darkened doorway that must have been the entrance to his mistress’s chambers. Endymion sprinted for it.

Grannus, Ajax and the rest crowded, dumb-faced, into the entrance of the garden.

From the mistress’s chamber came a high, thin scream.

“Calf-brain! That was a runaway!” Grannus shouted to the doorkeeper as he roughly shoved him aside and charged on. A half-dozen slaves of the household rushed forward to stop this human herd from invading the lady’s chamber, but Grannus got through.

Grannus stopped in the doorway of the dim, tapestried bedroom and had just enough time to see, caught in the grillwork of a balcony that overlooked the next street, cloth torn from the tunic he had provided the boy fluttering in the wind, mocking him. Then the lady struck, stabbing him with one of her long, sharp hairpins, penetrating the flesh of his upper arm to the bone.

The boy would pay for this, too.

Endymion had won himself a moment to think. He did not deceive himself into believing Grannus would give up the chase. Indeed, at that moment, Grannus was redoubling his efforts; in the next street he paid a small sum to a public crier, who moved toward the Old Forum, calling out, “Boy, dark hair, dark eyes, and comely, ran off from Grannus’ fuller’s shop! Amulet of black leather about his neck! Boy—” in his penetrating singsong cry.

Endymion ran up Mercury Street, knowing he had to inform the one true friend of his short life of his fate. Then he would go and hide in the
Cloaca Maxima
—the city’s Great Drain—and tomorrow, the gods willing, he would escape from the city. He stopped halfway down the short, steep street and cast a pebble at the shuttered first-story window of Pollio’s bakery shop. Within moments a man with drifting white hair, an unobtrusive ghost, materialized in the doorway and began descending the stone steps with timid care, as though he feared he might step in something unpleasant. The old man’s testing glance flicked from side to side, stopping suddenly at the sight of the boy. His smile was as the boy imagined a hermit’s would be—tentative and shy from lack of use.

“Lycas,” Endymion cried, embracing him with boyish vigorousness. “I’ve run away.”

Lycas grasped the boy’s shoulders, frail desperation in his hands. “That is children’s foolishness, Creon.”

“You’ve fallen two names behind—it’s Endymion
now. And it’s true.”

“It is death, boy,” he whispered, thrusting his face into Endymion’s, transfixing the boy with bleary eyes. “Reading’s the cause of this. Books are worse than wine, I say, you read one and you need another—there’s no end to it. What ails you that you cannot content yourself with just living on under the sun? Grannus at least did not beat you every day.”

“I—” he began, and stopped, seeing no use in telling Lycas he wanted to be a philosopher as Seneca was. He already believes I’m half mad, the boy thought. Why worry him more by proving it to him? “I want to…to belong to no one but the gods.”

“The rats in the slaves’ prison belong to no one. Is it so glorious? They say those rats are large enough to take a hound. By sunfall tomorrow you’ll know if it’s true.”

“Lycas, it’s been done and cannot be undone. Can you get me some crusts and oil and maybe a—Lycas, you are ill.”

“The same sickness. It has settled on the lungs.”

“What is being done for it?”

“Nothing this time. I’m too old to treat. For certain it’s the Island for me this time.” When masters did not want to pay for the treatment of sick slaves often they abandoned them on the tiny Island of Aesculapius—the god of healing—that broke the brownish-yellow waters of the Tiber.

“That is against the law.”

“You have not changed. When you grow up you’ll realize a law’s but words, my boy. One bribe is worth a hundred laws. Pollio does as he wills.”

“Then I
shall
live—if only to return and punish him for that.” Something dark and brilliant flashed in the boy’s eyes then, and it frightened the old man, for it was a passion that might challenge kings. Such determination could only bring trouble into the life of a slave.

“A pity all this is, my poor…what name did you say?…Endymion. You would have been tall, and comelier than Paris. Here, take these, my boy.” Lycas fumbled with a pouch that hung from the thong that girded his tunic.

“Your grain tokens! I can’t—”

“Spargus can always steal me more.” He pressed them into Endymion’s hand. “Now be careful where you barter them. You don’t want stolen grain tokens added to your troubles. Now stay away from—”

From the street both heard the cheerful melodic call of the crier, “Boy, fair of feature, dark hair, dark eyes, run off from Grannus’ shop…”

“Nemesis!” Endymion whispered, looking swiftly up and down Mercury Street. “Get inside, quickly, you must not be seen with me. Curses on all life. Lycas, one day I will help you. I promise it as I live, and I swear it on this amulet. I do not know how I’ll do it, but I will.” He gave Lycas a quick clumsy embrace and was off.

Lycas felt misery welling in his chest as he watched the boy bound up the street in springing strides. What would become of that haunted child? His only flaw was that perverse urge to question the natural order of things. The old man was ashamed, he loved that boy so much. Love was a useless and troublesome emotion for a slave.

As Endymion struggled through the throng in the Via Sacra, making slow progress toward the Great Drain, he was forced to halt at a crossroad, for some sort of procession approached, making its way toward the Palace. He heard the rhythmic tramp of the way-clearers’ feet, the snap of their whips, and a soft chorus of cries of
“Clarissimus”
—“Illustrious One”—the crowd’s traditional salutation for a great man. Endymion felt a start of panic as he realized his progress would be barred for many moments, but as there was no sign anywhere of Grannus or the crier, he calmed his fears.

Before him, beneath the shimmering disk of the moon, loomed the Palace of the Caesars; dusk washed it a uniform shade of blue-white so that it seemed a single floating form, at once delicate and awesome, a haunting testament to power on earth. Its multitude of shivering lamps alight in tier upon tier of moon-pale colonnades made it appear an earthly firmament ablaze with stars, which seemed fitting to the boy since gods dwelled there. Sweet spicy scents that slowed the limbs drifted from the Palace, filling him with heavy pleasurable sensations as though the multitude of delights to be known within could send out their own intoxicating vapor. A debilitating longing, stinging, bittersweet, settled on him as he thought of all that was housed within—more books than he could read in a lifetime and wise ministers who used philosophy to decide the fates of distant nations.

Then the procession came abreast of him and he could see the Palace no more. Three ranks of red-liveried attendants were followed by friends and clients on foot, all robed in purest white. Above them a grand litter gently swayed, shouldered by eight Bithynian bearers; the covered chair was hung with rose-garlands flung at it by admirers. Endymion guessed there was some great banquet tonight at the Palace, and this litter bore the guest of honor.

Then a second litter came up behind the first; it was this one that caused him to take a quick breath. It was starkly plain, not even curtained, leaving its occupant visible to the people.

A bolt of excitement shot through him.
Seneca.
Of course. Who else would be carried about in such a shabby litter? The chair came closer and now he recognized the living face behind the portrait busts everywhere on view. The boy supposed that as First Advisor to the Emperor, the great philosopher dined nightly at the Palace. Very likely, every day at dusk he passed this way.

All thought of danger fled Endymion’s mind. He fought his way through the press of people, desperate to get close. He pushed his way between a Tuscan farmer and a silk merchant, then suddenly found himself nearly in the litter’s path.

Seneca was reading as he was borne along, squinting as he held a bronze hand lamp close to a bookroll, his nobly proportioned bald head bowed.

The statues of him do not do him justice, the boy thought. They do not capture those eyes, how they seem to love the world, how they teem with enough knowledge to fill the bookrolls of a dozen rich men’s libraries. Or all the patient kindliness in that face, or that visible firmness of purpose. I can hear him declaring aloud a slave is a man, not an animal to be beaten, that the bloody contests of the arena are wrong; I see him looking with dark scorn at those who call him foolish or mad.

Was the philosopher reading from one of his own works, perhaps a copy that he, Endymion, had penned? What grand thoughts upon the nature of the universe flickered through that magically complex mind even as he gazed upon him?

Endymion did not hear the cry behind him, “Boy, dark hair, dark eyes, black amulet about his neck…”

Then the biting stench of urine enveloped him. Unnoticed, Grannus had slipped up close behind him. With him was a man of the Vigiles, the city’s police-firemen, in leather armor and steel cap; from one of his hands hung a coiled length of rope. The boy spun around, but too late; the rope snapped about him, binding his arms to his sides. A second rope slid over his wrists, burning his flesh. Someone kicked him from behind, and he fell into the path of the litter bearers of the philosopher. He muffled a moan, refusing to cry out, enraged that his one lapse of attention had brought about his destruction. The Fates used his love of philosophy to bait him like an animal.

“Got
the little hellion!” Grannus exclaimed through heaving laughter. “It pays a man to keep his body in soldier’s condition. A small cross is all we’ll need for this one.” He kicked the boy in the stomach.

But Endymion somehow managed to struggle up. The litter’s progress was halted while the bearer who had half stumbled over the boy righted himself. For one instant the gazes of boy and philosopher met.