Roma Eterna Read online

  “Yes,” Antipater said. “Of course, Caesar.” All educated men knew Greek; but it was the Greek of Homer and Sophocles and Plato that was taught in the academies of Roma, not the very different modern-day Byzantine version spoken from Illyricum eastward to Armenia and Mesopotamia. Languages do change. The Latin of Maximilianus VI’s Roma wasn’t the Latin of Virgil and Cicero, either. It was for his fluency in modern Greek that Antipater had won his place at court.

  He moved swiftly through the casually scrawled words. And very quickly he realized why the Emperor was trembling.

  “Merciful God defend us!” he muttered, when he was only halfway through.

  “Yes,” said the Emperor. “Yes. If only he would.”

  “What it was,” said Antipater to Justina that evening in his small but pleasantly situated apartments on the Palatine Hill, “was a dispatch from the Byzantine admiral in Sicilia to the commander of a second Greek fleet that seems to be moored off the western coast of Sardinia, although we didn’t know until now that any such fleet was there. The message instructs the commander of the Sardinian naval force to proceed on a northerly route past Corsica toward the mainland and capture our two ports on the Ligurian coast. Antipolis and Nicaea, their names are.” He had no business telling her anything of this. Not only was he revealing military secrets, an act that in theory was punishable by death, but she was a Greek, to boot. A daughter of the famed Botaniates family, no less, which had supplied illustrious generals to the Byzantine Emperors for three hundred years. It was fully probable that some of the Greek legions that were marching toward Roma at this very moment were under the command of distant cousins of hers.

  But he could withhold nothing from her. He loved her. He trusted her. Justina would never betray him, Greek though she was. A Botaniates, even, although from a secondary and impoverished branch of the family. But just as his own people had given up their allegiance to Byzantium to seek better opportunities in the Western Empire, so had hers. The only difference was that his family had Romanized itself three and a half centuries back and hers had crossed over when she was a little girl. She still felt more comfortable speaking in Greek than in Latin. Yet to her the Byzantines were “the Greeks” and the Romans were “us.” That was sufficient for him.

  “I was in Nicaea once,” she said. “A beautiful little place, mountains behind it, lovely villas all along the coast. The climate is very mild. The mountains shelter it from the north winds that come down out of the middle of Europa. You see palm trees everywhere, and there are plants in bloom all winter long, red, yellow, purple, white. Flowers of every color.”

  “It isn’t as a winter resort that the Basileus wants it,” Antipater said. They had just finished dinner: grilled breast of pheasant, baked asparagus, a decent bottle of the smooth sweet golden-hued wine of Rhodes. Even here in wartime fine Greek wines were still available in Roma, if only to the fortunate members of the Imperial elite, though with the eastern ports suffering from the Byzantine blockade the stocks were unlikely to last much longer.

  “Here. Look at this, Justina.”

  He snatched up a tablet and quickly sketched a rough map: the long peninsula of Italia with Sicilia at its tip, the coastline of Liguria curving away along the mainland to the west with the two big islands of Corsica and Sardinia in the sea to the south of it, and that of Dalmatia to the east. With emphatic little dots of his stylus he marked in Antipolis and Nicaea on the coast just to the left of the place where Italia began its southward thrust out of the heart of Europa toward the African shore.

  Justina rose and walked around to his side of the table so that she could stand behind him and peer over his shoulder. The fragrance of her perfume drifted toward him, that maddeningly wonderful Arabian myrrh of hers that also could no longer be bought in Roma because of the Greek blockade, and his heart began to pound. He had never known anyone quite like this little Greek. She was a light-boned, delicately built woman: tiny, actually, but with sudden and surprisingly voluptuous curves at hip and bosom. They had been lovers for the past eighteen months and even now, Antipater was convinced, she had not yet exhausted her entire repertoire of passionate tricks.

  “All right,” he said, compelling himself rigorously to focus on the matter at hand. He gestured toward the lower part of his map. “The Greeks have already come across from Africa, just a short hop, and established a beachhead in Sicilia. It would be child’s play for them to cross the strait at Messana and start marching up the peninsula toward the capital. The Emperor expects that some such move is imminent, and he’s stationed half the home legions down here in the south, in Calabria, to keep them from getting any closer to us than the vicinity of Neapolis, let alone all the way up to Roma. Now, over here in the northeast”—Antipater indicated the upper right corner of the peninsula, where Italia bordered on the provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia, which now were fully under Byzantine control—“we have the other half of the home army, guarding the border out back of Venetia against the inevitable push from that direction. The rest of our northern frontier, the territories bordering on Gallia and Belgica, is secure at this time and we aren’t anticipating any Greek attempt to break through from that direction. But now, consider this—”

  He tapped the stylus against the western shores of Sardinia and Corsica.

  “Somehow,” he said, “Andronicus seems to have managed to get a fleet up the far side of these two islands, where we haven’t expected them to go sniffing around at all. Possibly they marched westward along the African shore and secretly built a bunch of ships somewhere on the Mauritanian coast. However they did it, they’re there, apparently, and now they’re in a position to outflank us on the west. They sail up past Corsica and seize the Ligurian seacoast, and then they use Nicaea and Antipolis as bases to send an army down the peninsula through Genua and Pisae and Viterbo and right on into Roma, and there’s not a thing we can do about it. Not with half our army tied up on the northeast frontier to keep them from moving against us out of Dalmatia and the other half waiting south of Neapolis for an invasion from Sicilia. There isn’t any third half to defend the city from a fast attack on our unguarded side.”

  “Can’t the frontier legions be pulled down out of central Gallia to defend the Ligurian ports?” Justina asked.

  “Not quickly enough to head off a Greek landing there. And in any case if we yanked troops out of Gallia, the Greeks could simply move their forces westward from Dalmatia, break into Gallia Transalpina themselves, and come down out of the mountains at us the way Hannibal did fifteen hundred years ago.” Antipater shook his head. “No, we’re boxed in. They’ve got us on three sides at once, and that’s one too many.”

  “But the message to the Sardinian commander was intercepted before it got to him,” Justina pointed out. “He doesn’t know that he’s supposed to bring his ships north.”

  “Do you think they sent only one such message?”

  “What if they did, and it was never intended to reach the Sardinian commander in the first place? I mean, what if it was a hoax?”

  He stared. “A hoax, did you say?”

  “Suppose that in fact there’s no Greek fleet at all anchored west of Sardinia. But Andronicus wants us to think that there is, and therefore he had this fake message sent out for us to intercept, so that we’d get flustered and move troops toward Liguria to meet the nonexistent invasion force there. Which would open up a hole on one of the other fronts that his forces could stroll right through.”

  What a bizarre notion! For a moment Antipater was taken aback by the thought that Justina could come up with anything so far-fetched. Far-fetched ideas were supposed to be his specialty, not hers. But then he felt a surge of delight and admiration at the fertility of her imagination.

  He grinned at her in an access of overflowing love. “Oh, Justina! You really are a Greek, aren’t you?”

  A quick flash of surprise and puzzlement sparkled in the shining black depths of her eyes.

  “What?”

 
“Subtle, I mean. Inscrutable. Dark and devious of thought. The mind that could hatch an idea like that—”

  She did not seem flattered. Annoyed, rather: she responded with a quirk of the full lips, a toss of her head. The carefully appointed row of jet-black curls across her forehead was thrown into disarray. She swept them back into place with a crisp peremptory gesture. “If I could hatch it, so could the Basileus Andronicus. So could you, Lucius. It’s perfectly obvious. Cook up a false message and deliberately let it be captured, precisely so that Caesar will go into a panic, and start pulling his forces away from places they ought to be and into places where they aren’t needed.”

  “Yes. Of course. But I think the message is genuine, myself.”

  “Does Caesar? How did he react when you read it to him?”

  “He pretended to be calm and cool and completely unruffled.”

  “Pretended?”

  “Pretended, yes. But his hand was shaking when he gave me the scroll. He already knew roughly what it said, and it frightened him.”

  “He’s an old man, Lucius.”

  “Not really. Not in terms of years, anyway.” Antipater rose and went to the window, and stood there staring out into the gathering gray of dusk. The lights of the capital were beginning to gleam on the dark hills all around. A beautiful sight; he never tired of it. His place, well down the hill from the royal palace itself, was far from majestic, but it had a choice location in the quarter of the Palatine reserved for top-level civil servants. From his portico he could see the great grim bulk of the ancient Coliseum where it rose against the horizon, and the lower end of the Forum below it, and the nearby sector of the splendiferous jumbled arc of marbled buildings of all eras that stretched off to the east, awesome structures going back hundreds and hundreds of years: back, some of them, to the time of Augustus and Nero and the first Trajan.

  He had been fifteen, a greenhorn from the not very significant city of Salona in the not very significant province of Dalmatia, when he first saw the city of Roma. He had never outgrown the wonder that the capital inspired in him, not even now, when he moved daily among the great men of the realm and had come to understand only too clearly how far from great in truth they were. Yes, of course, they were mere grasping mortals like everyone else. But the city was great, the greatest, indeed, that had ever existed in the world, or ever would.

  Was all this to be looted and torched now by the triumphant Byzantines, as it had been by the Gauls, so it was said, sixteen hundred years before? Or—what was more likely—would the Greeks just walk in and effortlessly take possession, destroying nothing, simply making themselves the masters of the city out of which their own empire had sprung once upon a time?

  Justina came up behind him and pressed herself close. He felt her breasts flattening against his back. Their tips seemed to him to be hard.

  Softly she said, “Lucius, what are we going to do now?”

  “In the next five minutes, or the next three months?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “If the Greeks take Roma, you mean?”

  “Not if. When.”

  He answered without turning toward her. “I don’t actually think that will happen, Justina.”

  “You just said that there’s no way we can defend ourselves against attacks coming from three directions at once.”

  “I know. But I want to believe that I’m wrong. The Emperor has called a meeting of the Great Council first thing tomorrow, and maybe someone’s got a battle plan that I don’t know about.”

  “Or maybe not.”

  “Even so,” Antipater said. “Let’s say that the worst happens: that they march against the city and we surrender, and the Greeks take control of the Western Empire. Nothing much should change, if they do. They’re civilized people, after all. They might even want to keep the Emperor around as a puppet ruler, if he’s willing. In any event they’ll still need civil servants who are fluent in both languages. My position should be safe.”

  “And mine?”

  “Yours?”

  “You’re a Roman citizen, Lucius. You look like a Greek, yes, and why not, considering that your people came originally from Syria—from Antioch, isn’t that so? But your family’s been living in the Western Empire for centuries and centuries and you were born in a Roman province. Whereas I—”

  “You’re Roman too.”

  “Yes, if you believe that Byzantines are Romans just because they say that their country is the Roman Empire and their emperor calls himself King of the Romans. But Greek is what they speak and Greek is what they are. And I’m a Greek, Lucius.”

  “A naturalized citizen of Roma, though.”

  “Am I?”

  Startled, he swung around to face her. “You are, aren’t you?”

  “What I am is an Asian Greek. That isn’t any secret. My family’s from Ephesus, originally. When my father’s shipping business went bad we moved to Athens and he started over. When he lost three ships in the same storm he went bankrupt and we left for the Western Empire to escape his creditors. I was three years old then. We lived in Syracusae in Sicilia at first, and then in Neapolis, and after my father died I moved to Roma. But nowhere along the way did I become a Roman citizen.”

  “I never knew that,” Antipater said.

  “Well, you do now.”

  “All the same, what does it matter?”

  “It doesn’t, maybe, so long as Maximilianus is Emperor. But what happens after the Byzantines take over? Can’t you figure that out, Lucius? A Botaniates who sleeps with Romans? They’ll punish me as a traitor!”

  “Nonsense. Roma’s full of Greeks. Always has been. Syrian Greeks, Armenian Greeks, Aegyptian Greeks, Cappadocian Greeks, even Greek Greeks. Once Andronicus’s crowd is in charge, they won’t care a rat’s ass who was sleeping with whom.”

  But she clung to him, terrified. He had never seen her like this. “How do you know? I’m afraid of what might happen. Let’s run away, Lucius. Before they get here.”

  “And go where?”

  “Does it matter? Somewhere. Anywhere. Just so long as it’s far from here.”

  He wondered how he could calm her. She seemed to be in the grip of inordinate unthinking fear. Her face was pale, her eyes had a glassy sheen, her breath was coming in little sobbing gusts.

  “Please, Justina. Please.”

  He took her hands in his for a moment, then slid his fingers up her arms until they rested along her collarbones. Tenderly he kneaded the muscles of her neck, trying to soothe her. “Nothing will happen to us,” he said gently. “The Empire hasn’t fallen yet, for one thing. It isn’t necessarily going to, despite the way everything looks right now. It’s survived some pretty bad things in the past and it may well survive this. The Basileus Andronicus might drop dead tomorrow. The sea might swallow his fleet the way it did your father’s ships. Or Jupiter and Mars might suddenly appear in front of the Capitol and lead us to a glorious victory. Anything might happen. I don’t know. But even if the Empire does fall, it won’t be the end of the world, Justina. You and I will be all right.” He stared intensely into her eyes. Could he make her believe something that he didn’t fully believe himself? “You—and—I—will—be—all—right—”

  “Oh, Lucius—”

  “We’ll be all right. Yes.” Antipater folded her small body up against his and held her close until her breathing sounded normal again and he could feel her taut frame beginning to relinquish its tension. And then—a transition so swift that it almost made him want to chuckle—her entire body softened and her hips began to move slowly from side to side. She pressed herself close, wriggling in unmistakable invitation. Her eyes were closed, her nostrils were distended, her tongue flickered like a serpent’s between her lips. Yes. Yes. Everything would be all right, somehow. They would close the walls in around themselves and ignore all that was going on outside. “Come,” he said. He drew her toward the waiting bedchamber.

  The Great Council of State assembled at the second
hour of morning in the grand velvet-hung chamber known as the Hall of Marcus Anastasius on the northern side of the Imperial palace. Both Consuls were there, and half a dozen senior figures of the Senate, and Cassius Cestianus, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and Cocceius Maridianus, the Secretary for Home Affairs, and seven or eight other government ministers as well, and a formidable battery of retired generals and naval officers. So, too, were the key members of the Imperial household: Aurelius Gellius, the Praetorian Prefect, and Domitius Pompeianus, the Master of Latin Letters, and Quintilius Vinicius, the Keeper of the Imperial Treasury, and more. To Antipater’s astonishment, even Germanicus Antoninus Caesar, the Emperor’s rascally younger brother, had come. His presence was appropriate, since at least in theory he was the heir to the throne; but never had Antipater seen that wastrel prince at any sort of council meeting before, nor, to Antipater’s recollection, had Germanicus ever been visible in public at all at such an early hour of the day. When he came sauntering in now, it caused a palpable stir.

  The Emperor began the proceedings by asking Antipater to read the captured Greek scroll aloud.

  “Demetrios Chrysoloras, Grand Admiral of the Imperial Fleet, to His Excellency Nicholas Chalcocondyles of Trebizond, Commander of Western Naval Forces, greetings! Be advised by these documents, O Nicholas, of the unanswerable will of His Most Puissant Imperial Majesty and Supreme Master of All Regions, Andronicus Maniakes, who by the grace of God holds the exalted title of King of the Romans and Lord Autocrat of—”

  “Will you spare us this Greek foolishness, Antipater, and get to the essence of the matter?” came a drawling voice from the side of the chamber.

  Antipater, rattled, looked up. His eyes met those of Germanicus Caesar. It was he who had spoken. The Emperor’s brother, lounging in his chair as though at a banquet, was rouged and pomaded to gaudy effect, and his purple-edged white robe was rumpled and stained with wine. Antipater understood now how Germanicus had managed to be here at this early hour: he had simply come directly to the palace after some all-night party.