Boy Caesar (2 page)

‘There’s a line of Seneca’s’, Serge said, ‘which goes “The object of their toil was their epitaph.” You may know it, for it expresses the futility of all human aspirations. Don’t set out to provoke trouble is my advice. It will come to you in due course, anyhow.’

Heliogabalus had to restrain the impulse to laugh. He had no intention of adopting his tutor’s discretion in public life. He wanted to burn brightly and go out in a blinding flash, affirming his vision. ‘What really interests me in Ovid, to return to the
Metamorphoses,
is when his characters are overtaken by ritual frenzy.’

‘We call it daemonic,’ Serge said. ‘A form of overreach that exceeds intoxication but has properties in common with that state.’

‘I like the idea of the participants dressing in leopard skin and conducting nocturnal orgies,’ Heliogabalus said.

‘You should remember also,’ Serge continued, ‘that
orgia
are not orgies but acts of devotion and that
bacheuein
is not to revel but to have a particular kind of religious experience. Ovid is thinking more in terms of what we call inspiration, in the sense of the poet feeling possessed or overtaken by his theme.’

Heliogabalus admired Serge for his unfailing ability to direct ideas into serious discourse. His tone rarely switched from an intellectually maintained gravitas, although he suspected his tutor of being a regular visitor to the male brothel in one of sidestreets in the city centre.

‘Madness as an altered state interests me greatly,’ Heliogabalus said, attempting to hijack the theme. ‘We should differentiate between this and the pathology that labels people mad.’

‘You know too much for your years,’ Serge replied, again throwing
his eyes into a wide-screen take on the rain-stripped garden. ‘You speak like a poet. Clearly Ovid has got into your bloodstream.’

‘Ecstasy is the state with which I most readily identify,’ he answered. ‘Doesn’t the Dionysian initiate orchestrate his own measure of dementia in proportion to the increased hold established by the god? I believe I can govern a people through imagination, young as I am.’

Serge was about to tone down the recklessness of his pupil’s claim, when a servant expressing apologies hurried into the room. There had been a change in events and Heliogabalus was urgently required to join his mother in the left wing of the villa. He knew from the peremptory nature of the command that he was being summoned to fight. For months his mother, fuelled by the ambition for power, had been plotting a strategically devised offensive against Macrinus. He knew that she and her duplicitous circle would stop at nothing to have Heliogabalus appointed emperor. The recent news she had given him pointed much in their favour. In the attempt to increase his popularity with a disaffected army, Macrinus had appointed his son Diadumenis associate emperor, a move so unpopular with the Army that they threatened to desert.

As Heliogabalus crossed the marble floors in the direction of a room in which he could hear excited voices, he was aware once again of the individual destiny he carried. If his grandmother, Julia Mesa, younger sister of the empress Julia Domna, was the drive-unit behind the conspiracy, then he was a willing participant in her scheme. He wished only that he could be proclaimed emperor without having to lead a disabused army into the field. He dreaded the rank smells of horse-sweat, the carnage, hot blood gouting in litres, urine and excrement. Armies carried with them the smell of death, like the murdered body he had discovered on the road one day, with his mount rearing up like it had been electrified. He remembered the stench and how flies had lined the wound, thick as black jelly. If he was to be used as a tool in the political struggle, then he assured himself it would be once and once only.

When he entered the room both his grandmother and his mother came over to escort him into the circle. He could see the
occasional raised eyebrow express silent disapproval of his light makeup. He was conscious he would be forgiven these things only if he acquitted himself in battle. That he was queer went without saying; that he had a right to be was something it was necessary for him to prove.

Contrary to what he had expected, it was his mother’s lover Gannys who led the way in giving him a résumé of affairs. He was told that the Army had declared him Caracalla’s son and that he had a majority support. Macrinus, believing himself invulnerable, refused to leave Antioch and had left his prefect Julianus in charge of the troops. It was important, Gannys emphasized, to capitalize on Macrinus’ misassessment of the situation. If they struck now they would have the advantage. At the sight of Caracalla’s son leading the Army, it was more than probable that the seasoned praetorians would desert Macrinus’ cause and be won over.

All of this made perfect sense to Heliogabalus, who none the less felt totally dissociated from proceedings. He knew that he had to act and could do so only by adopting Serge’s advice and sitting on his true feelings. He despised Gannys with the same distaste he felt for war. He resented any man whose body came between him and his mother. He looked at the man’s squat, unrefined features and suspected his mother of bad taste. He wondered how Gannys failed to smell him as the intruder on his mother’s skin. Incest was another of his secrets he had to bury. He himself would have peeled the offending scent off her like a roll of film and confronted her with it.

After Gannys the military had their say. The rains were expected to move off that night, and plans to mobilize within two days were intended to coincide with a total eclipse of the sun. He was told that he would be closely protected in the field by a number of select praetorian minders but that it was incumbent on him to inspire confidence in the troops by his leadership. The opposition, he was told, were little more than splinter-groups of mercenaries, criminals and soldiers retained on triple pay. The latter wore red cloaks as gifts from the emperor, as part of his spurious claim to be an Antonine, but had little or no reason to be loyal. He was informed that in
the event of victory letters would be dispatched to Rome declaring him emperor, before the procession set off on the long haul to the capital.

He listened to what was being said in a dream state. He had so often imagined himself as caesar that he feared the reality would be disillusioning. Part of him would have preferred to keep the fantasy safe rather than act on it. He could hear the rain outside giving over, perhaps as a sign, he told himself, that now really was the time for him to engage with Macrinus. He was bored by the military, caring more for the damage done to the sprays of lemon-scented mimosa and to the smashed torrent of pink camellia heads than he did for their strategies.

That night he went to his mother’s bed, determined to talk to her of death. It was not so much that he was afraid, it was more that he wanted to test his ideas on the subject against her own. He found her waiting for him in a purple see-through gown and had to dismiss her advances in the interests of conversation. It was not for nothing, he reminded himself, that his real name was Varius, indicating that he was not only the son of various men but that his mother was notoriously promiscuous.

Symiamira, not giving up on her intentions, lay beside him on a couch, her sinuous body forming the shape of an S placed on its side. He resented the fact that his mother considered her body to be her only instrument of expression. He knew from experience that if he coaxed a little of the story from her interior she would reveal an understanding of life that he had never counted on existing. Her reading of character, learned through her senses rather than her head, displayed a naive but profound ability to penetrate defences. He knew that when encouraged to give shape and value to her thoughts she possessed a surprising facility to point up the psychological traits in an individual’s behaviour. Her essential grittiness was not without subtlety, nor her hedonism without the ability to reflect on her life of reckless excess.

Now that the rains had lifted the heat was oppressive. He sat beside his mother, hardly knowing how to start. He wanted to tell her that ambition and death were one and the same and that the
pursuit of office was correspondingly an invitation to die. It was not just Serge quoting Seneca on the subject that had triggered the impulse in him, it was the realization that he might die in the field. The priests of Emesa had assured him that to die in the pursuit of individual destiny was the only death acceptable to the gods; only he didn’t want to lose his life fronting an army he despised.

For weeks now the phrase ‘What can be better for me than to be heir to myself?’ had been coming into his mind, and he still had not succeeded in puzzling out the enigma. He decided to try it on his mother, who was in the process of getting drunk.

He assumed she was not listening, as she closed her eyes and seemed to be wanting to shut him out. Then suddenly, in a voice that seemed to belong to somebody else, she said very clearly, ‘Dry stones are not fetched from a stream. You will get to Rome unharmed, but the stones will return to the river.’ She sat up as abruptly, looked confused, and said, ‘Did I speak? Sometimes I have no knowledge of what I say or where it comes from. Don’t take my words too seriously.’

Heliogabalus looked away, his mind elsewhere. ‘What you have just told me is not unlike what I have read in Seneca, who says, “No good thing makes its possessor happy, unless his mind is reconciled to the possibility of loss.”’

‘Your life hasn’t begun yet,’ Symiamira said, by way of reassurance. She angled her foot in his lap, but he would not be drawn. He sat wondering why his individual role in life should be different from Serge’s or his mother’s or Julian’s, the blond boy who was his lover. Sex, he had discovered, was the gateway to an ecstatic union with death, but it offered him no significant clue to his identity. He assumed that nobody could explain to him the mystery of why he, a Syrian youth who had never seen Rome, should be in line to be its future emperor. If the secret was coded in his genome, then he doubted he would ever know. Like all those before him, he would turn the question over in the dark pockets before dawn or in snatches of self-reflection watching a sunset point up acute orange and vermilion.

His mother looked at him from a place that lacked all signposting.
He was afraid that she was about to predict his imminent death, but instead she returned to drinking and laughed in a manner suggesting she had scared the thought away. ‘Men think only of their balls,’ she said tersely. ‘They attempt to squeeze the life out of themselves, together with their secrets.’

‘What are you trying to tell me, Mother?’ he asked, the catch in his voice causing her to look at him with concern.

‘That you have a rival in Gannys. He has his own plans to become emperor. If we are successful in our claim he will have to be killed.’

‘But he’s your lover,’ Heliogabalus said, shocked by the ruth-lessness of his mother’s scheming. That life appeared so cheap to her upended his beliefs in its sanctity. He felt suddenly like the casings had been torn from his nerves. In order to make his point he was tempted to walk out on her and on the idea of being emperor.

Symiamira tried again to trigger his sexual interest, but he pushed her away and stonewalled her attempts to coax him into conversation. He knew that if Gannys could be so easily disposed of then his own life would follow. What he wanted more than anything before he died was to know the sort of intense love that his friends had never experienced. That it would be with a man didn’t matter; in his mind the bond could only be heightened by the quality of likeness.

He could hear the noises of an army assembling out there in the night: men who were probably unaware of why or for whom they were fighting. Their needs, he knew, were the perennial ones of money, camaraderie and brutally perpetrated sex on the vulnerable. They would be paid with money derived from theft, and they in turn would commit grossly unsanctioned crimes. He had refused outright to study Tacitus’
Annals
or any other martial accounts of the Roman Army’s remorseless war-machine. Armies had been consistemly liquidated, but an essentially genocidal residue survived and persisted. Scorched by the African sun, gored by stampeding elephants, eaten alive by cannibals, he knew the stories and how
nothing ever succeeded in turning the Army around. They were rapacious to the point of fighting their own shadow.

He could sense his mother’s feelings of rejection. She got up from the bed and slipped a silk gown over the transparent one. Instead of returning to the couch, she went over to a lamp-lit corner of the room and arranged herself on a tondo of red cushions. She had shut herself up from words again, and her downturned mood showed in the way she narrowed her eyes at the glass.

He felt too vulnerable to risk being alienated from her at such a time. For all he knew, tonight could be their last together, and Serge’s teachings had impressed on him that animosity was the wrong state in which to die. He wanted to make it up and went over to her and bruised her mouth with his lips. He knew that his body language would communicate on a deeper level than words. He worked his tongue like a feeler into her palate and withdrew before he got caught up in the erotics of her response. He could feel her mood change instantly, registering how he had succeeded in throwing the right switch.

‘I’ll follow your advice,’ he said, aware of the compromise he was making. ‘From what I’ve read in the histories, being emperor is an unenviable thing.’

‘You must never say that to anyone,’ Symiamira warned him, her expression so serious that it jolted him out of self-reflection. ‘Men everywhere will envy you your position. Your cousin Alexander, although only a child, has an equal right to rule. Take what is yours, and together we will face the consequences.’

Although he knew he was too young to find a similar basis of trust in himself, Heliogabalus invariably turned to Seneca’s thoughts as a consoling source of back-up. The line ‘I shall never be frightened when the last hour comes; I am already prepared and do not plan a whole day ahead’ had worked its way into his mind while his mother was talking. Philosophy gave him a pivot and provided a necessary window between himself and reality.