The Kingdom of the Wicked (58 page)

       'We marvel at the speed with which Caesar has put things into operation.'

       'Reverend senators, we shall meet tomorrow to discuss the raising of finances for the rebuilding of the city. There is not a moment to be lost.'

       'Has Caesar,' Piso asked, 'any notion of how this disaster may have started?'

       'Oh, Rome has always been a terrible place for fires. These wooden shops and tenements, oil lamps, sudden strong winds. On this occasion we have been more unfortunate than usual.' But he could not help seeming to smile. 'But think of the phoenix, the resurrection, that sort of thing. We must always look on the bright side. One of these days, and it may be soon, you will look on a Rome to be proud of.'

       'The trouble is,' Tigellinus said to his master, walking beside the northward-jolting litter, 'they will want to fix the blame somewhere.'

       'Why? An act of the gods, an accident. Rome has known it before.'

       'May I put it another way. They will feel happier, if you can talk of such an emotion, if they have someone to blame. If I may say so, Caesar, you've talked too much about the great phoenix Neropolis.'

       'Every emperor has talked, and freely too, of finding brick and leaving marble.'

       'This Emperor is no darling of the Senate. It is the Senate that will want to fix the blame in one particular direction. Your trouble willbegin with the finance bills. The Senate will talk of starving the legions in the provinces to pay for Caesar's folly.'

       'It is no folly. You have seen the plans. The plans are a masterpiece of ah planning.'

       'I've seen the plans. You have not been backward in showing the plans. Everybody has seen the plans. They have not been rushed into being to meet an emergency. Those plans have been around for more than a year.'

       'Oh, longer, longer, Tigellinus. I've had the dream a long time.'

       'I think Caesar will have to pay a little money out of his own purse before he can even dream of putting those plans into operation.’

       ‘Money? To whom?'

       Tigellinus sighed deeply, then coughed: there was still acrid smoke about. 'Well, I would suggest a certain senator named Vettius Caprasius. Quite an orator. He will implant some of the right ideas.’

       ‘Where?'

       'Leave all this to me.'

       It was a week later that a demure Nero sat in the senate house, listening to an eloquent Vettius Caprasius, a lean man in early middle age, who told Caesar and the Senate who were the people who started the fire.

       'Caesar, reverend senators, I rise to report on the findings of the special commission appointed to inquire into the causes of the recent devastating conflagration that struck and crippled our city. Documents, letters, depositions — all of which the Senate is encouraged to examine at its leisure — point to an inescapable conclusion. The fire was an outrage perpetrated by a dissident group of this city, one that despises Rome, flouts the gods, regards the traditional Roman virtues — including those military virtues which built and sustain an empire — as totally derisory. Not the Jews, oh no. The Jews have suffered as much as any yet have been quick to contribute lavishly to the reconstruction fund. I refer to the Christians or Chrestians, a sect favoured by slaves, plebeians, perverts and foreigners, to whom vice is virtue and virtue vice. Well known for such hideous secret practices as cannibalism and incest, for refusing patriotic service of all kinds, including the taking of arms against Rome's enemies, they are at last revealed as terrorists and incendiaries. It is proposed that a new commission be formed to drag these loathsome reptiles out of their holes and to deal with them not according to the dictates of the law but in obedience to our impulses of disgust and outrage. We do not try mad dogs in courts of justice; we kill them outright. They bade our city suffer. They must suffer themselves.'

       'Oh, surely if we fined them,' Nero put in over the growls and murmurs, 'heavily that is, justice would be satisfied?'

       'As always, Caesar is too softhearted. Let just indignation take its inexorable course.'

       Not all the Senate agreed. Many of the Senate had a fair idea of what was going on. But there was no harm in letting the suffering people get at the Christians; it stopped them from clawing at the senators, who had already been inveighed against by mob orators as defective fathers and coldhearted self servers with villas untouched by the fire. Why, even Caesar himself had suffered: he wept bitterly over the ruined Palatine. Tigellinus quietly paid a mob to howl against the Christians and augment itself in a march on a house insolently near to the Imperial Forum. They knew the day to choose — Dies solis, when this atheistic lot got together to stew babies and eat them. The house belonged to a Greek master tailor named Lemos because he was goitrous, and the mob was delighted to find him presiding over a meal of white meat and Greek wine with others, men, women and children, of his filthy persuasion. The white meat, they swore, was really bread: taste it. It tasted like bread but the mob knew it was really meat. They spat it on the floor then went into the kitchen, where they made brands out of firewood and then began to inflame the house. Let these bastards get burnt like poor decent Romans did. They went further; they made a fire in front of the house, feeding it with furniture, books and bedclothes. Then they threw on it the smallest Christian child they could find, save the poor little swine from these bastards' cannibalism. The adult Christians, who were supposed to turn the other cheek of the arse they'd been battered on, turned very nasty and clawed the righteous mob. They were thrown on the fire too, some of them.

       It was then that the military took over. Christians had deliberately burnt this house which belonged to a decent Greek Roman named Lemos, who had a contract for making uniforms for the Praetorian Guard. Ergo they were incendiarists. Ergo they had set the city on fire. The soldiers set up under orders ten-foot stakes at six-foot intervals in the charred earth of the residential areas that had suffered most, and to these they bound Christians, men, women and children, soaked them in pitch and set light to them with torches. It was not hard to find the Christians. They did not deny what they were and they made a cabbalistic sign in the form of a cross when they were arrested. But of course they did not get all the Christians: there were too many of them.

       They did not get Marcus Julius Tranquillus, for instance. As they packed, Sara scolded him. 'I said from the first, you should never have got mixed up with them.'

       'Nonsense. Paul warned us we'd be scapegoats for something. Thank God we got the warning in time.'

       'Paul — Paul — First he's responsible for a shipwreck, now for a fire. I didn't like the look of the man.'

       'You're talking foolishly, woman. There'll be time to knock the nonsense out of you when we're safe in Pompeii.'

       'How do you know we'll be safe in Pompeii, wherever that is?'

       'Because my uncle will make sure we're safe. Respected, discreet, a reader of books, kind, lonely — I own him a visit. The story will be I incurred Nero's displeasure for something trivial. He'll be glad to shelter us. He believes in the old republic.'

       'Disaster, nothing but disaster. God makes the fire, God makes the wind blow. Blessed be the name of the Lord. All through our history. Escape, exile, wandering in the desert.'

       'For once the Jews are nobody's enemy. It's the Christians this time. You know, preachers of love and tolerance. We're the enemy.'

       Aquila had an urgent order for tents to be pitched in the Campus Martius and had to take on more help. Nobody thought of him as a Christian. Luke, leaving copies of his 'Pauliad' with his patient Gaius Petronius, left for the Adriatic coast. Linus was just discreetly no more around. But Peter, beard stirring in the wet wind, staff in hand, went weeping round the corpses of those he must think of as his butchered flock. Linus could postpone his paternity, papa of Rome to be, but Peter owed God a death and defied the morning cockcrow as he went about the city blessing and mourning. He was taken at first for an old foreign madman and left alone.

       Tigellinus said: 'If Caesar would care to read the report. Here is a list of some of the more unexpected members of the ah sect.'

       They were seated on that northwestern segment of the Palatine which had missed the fire. Here were living quarters enough, though not for an emperor. The work of reconstruction had started: engineers consulted their plans and foremen bellowed at sweating slaves. 'I'd no idea,' Nero said, 'there were so many of our pureborn aristocrats. Lucius Popidius Secundus — he was one, and I never knew. A fine eater and drinker.'

       'Well, of course — some of the enemies of the state have been listed as Chrestians. That makes things a lot easier. But most of them are the real thing.'

       'The term is Christians, Tigellinus. And I'm rather sick of these allegations of anthropophagy and so on. I can't bear ignorance. I learned a lot, you know, from that man.'

       'And that man, unfortunately, has left Italy. But I'm assured that he'll be back. These people talk very freely. They don't lie, or they don't seem to. They seem rather pleased at being arrested, some of them. They're mad, even the Romans have lost their Roman qualities. It's a debilitating sort of superstition.'

       'You don't understand, do you, Tigellinus? They don't mind dying. To them death is the gate to eternal life, if they've done right. If they've done wrong they go to a place where the fire burns without consuming. And that goes on for ever. But if they're executed because of their faith, then that turns them into witnesses for the faith, and all the wrong things they've done are cancelled out.'

       'You speak, Caesar, with a certain wistfulness. Not a pleasant thought, is it — eternal fire for having murdered and raped and tried to castrate a boy to turn him into a woman and turned yourself into a bride losing her maidenhood and thrust at the Vestal Virgins? Not a pleasant religion to have about the place. We're better without them. And the dear Roman people are having the time of their lives burning and robbing. Ah, policy, policy. We'll get them all, including the bald Jew who took your fancy.'

       'It won't do, though,' Nero frowned, 'all this burning. I'm sick of the stench of fire. It's not aesthetic. It's disordered. Gaius Petronius thinks so too. His sense of beauty and order is deeply offended.'

       'I thought you'd banished that waterlily.'

       'That waterlily, as you so rudely term him, has more sense of beauty in his little toes than you have in all your burly fishfed carcase. You're a coarse man, Tigellinus.'

       'Caesar, of course, knows all about coarseness.'

       'Caesar knows a lot of things, Tigellinus. That's why he's Caesar.'

       One thing Caesar knew was a little book written by a Greek physician which described the early struggles and triumphs of the Christian faith. Gaius Petronius had been enthusiastic about the strength of the narrative line, the almost Homeric terseness of the phraseology, though he regretted what the Greek language had lost since the time of the great ancients: it had, as the second language of the Empire, become a medium tending to the utilitarian, commercial, political, sentimental. It lacked the old marble and fire. The book was addressed, see, to a certain Theophilus, lover of God. Gaius Petronius had it on the word of the author himself that it was assumed some day Caesar would be Theophilus: what man better endowed with the insight to be washed in the pure light of the emergent truth? Nero knew Gaius Petronius was about his old game of extravagant flattery, but he was complaisant. Nero the darling of the ultimate god of truth and beauty and goodness: it was a pleasant idea. Unfortunately there was this doctrine of eternal fire. Given time, he might repent of his dastardly acts, acts thrust upon him by the destiny of the imperiate, but there was no guarantee of that. It was best to have the una nox dormienda, after all, and this meant having no Christianity in his realm. He burned the little book with his own hands, not knowing there were other copies. He would kill the upstart faith and all its adherents, so that none could prate to him of eternal fire, yet he would enable those adherents to believe they were going to eternal bliss. It would cost him nothing. But the whole business had to be carried out aesthetically. He conferred with Gaius Petronius as to how this might best be done.

       'You're so right, Caesar. It offends one's senses to see and smell all those corpses along the Appian Way and, indeed, the streets of the city.' Nero was with Petronius on a garden seat in an arbour of Petronius's leafy estate, whither the stench of smouldering Rome had never travelled. 'Refine the taste of the people — has not that always been our aim? Confine the deaths of these fanatics to the arena but in no brutal manner. Let them be drawn into representations of Roman myth and history. Greek too. It's a marvellous opportunity. Will you leave it to your humble friend and coadjutor to sketch a programme?'

       When the Roman people filed in from their temporary shelters to sit with their garlic sausages and children and wives, twenty thousand strong under awnings to hold off the sun, having become most sensitive to burning, they did not quite know what they were going to be given. The hydraulis boomed at them the usual purple music which conveyed vague emotions of death and glory, but then it abruptly ceased as a hundredfold of men and women marched proudly into the arena singing. The auditors were prepared to applaud the chorus, which resounded with what sounded like the poetic expression of the good old Roman virtues, but when the name Christus came into it the crowd reacted very unfavourably. Indeed, the brains of the less intelligent whirled with the terrible notion that things had become inverted, that the Emperor had gone suddenly mad and wished to present the Christians not as Rome-hating fireraisers but as a sect to be admired for their fireraising courage (always said the bastard wanted the city burned, didn't I, but he won't get away with this). But everything came right when a portcullis whizzed up and a pride of starved lions was thrust into the arena by men in Etruscan masks with five-thonged whips. The lions snarled back at their keepers, but then the portcullis clashed down and the lions began to show a vague interest in the Christian chorus. There were very hungry and they sniffed human sweat. They crept forward on their furry bellies, expecting resistance from their prey. All that happened was that the Christians, at a signal from a brawny young man who seemed to be their leader, went down on their knees with total unanimity and began to recite what sounded like a poem in Latin to their father in the skies. The phrase panem quotidianum raised some laughs among the vulgar; no more daily bread for this lot. When a lioness, with the instinct of a mother needing flesh for her cubs, made a leap on the Amen, a fighting spirit arose among the Christians, some of whom leapt on the lioness, to her apparent surprise, and rolled on top of her, pinning her to the sand with her paws up, roaring. Some of the lions looked languidly at this, but then one of them seemed to resent this human attack on one of the pride and walked, not too quickly, towards an old woman still on her knees. She screamed but remained immobile while the lion licked her left arm with his rough tongue. He clawed off the sleeve to get at the flesh and then blood started. It was enough. He had that old woman down on her back, lay on her and began to tear her throat out. A couple of young men who might have been her sons beat at the lion's rump and pulled his mane, but he kept to his meal, impervious.