Roma Eterna Read online

  The place is a madhouse. The sky streams with fire. On the great hills of the mighty, ancient palaces are burning; their charred marble walls topple like falling mountains. The colossal statue of some early Emperor lies strewn in fragments across the road. People run wildly in the streets, screaming, sobbing. Squads of wild-eyed soldiers rush about amongst them, shouting furiously and incoherently as they try to restore order without having any idea of whose orders to obey. I catch sight of a rivulet of crimson in the gutter and think for a terrible moment that it is blood; but no, no, it is only wine running out of a shattered wineshop, and men are falling on their faces to lap it from the cobblestones.

  I abandon my chariot—the streets are too crazy to drive in—and set out on foot. The center of the city is compact enough. But where shall I go? I wonder. To the Palatine? No: everything’s on fire up there. The Capitol? Scaevola will be there, I reason, and—how preposterous this sounds to me now—he can tell me where Lucilla is, and what has become of Severina Floriana.

  Of course I get nowhere near the Capitol. The entire governmental district is sealed off by troops. Edicts are posted in the streets, and I pause to read one, and it is then I discover the full extent of the alteration that this night has worked: that the Empire is no more, the Republic of the ancient days has returned. Scaevola now rules, but has the title not of Emperor but of First Consul.

  As I stand gaping and dazed in the street that runs past the Forum, I am nearly run down by a speeding chariot. I yell a curse at its driver; but then, to my great amazement, the chariot stops and a familiar ruddy face peers out at me.

  “Cymbelin! Good gods, is that you? Get in, man! You can’t stand around out there!”

  It’s my robust and jolly host from Neapolis, my father’s friend, Marcellus Domitianus Frontinus. What bad luck for him, I think, that he’s come visiting up here in Roma at a time like this. But I have it all wrong, as usual, and Marcellus Domitianus very quickly spells everything out for me.

  He has been in on the plot from the beginning—he and his brother the general, along with Junius Scaevola and Count Nero Romulus, were in fact the ringleaders. It was necessary, they felt, to destroy the Empire in order to save it. The current Emperor was an idle fool, the previous one had been allowed to stay on the throne too long, the whole idea of a quasi-hereditary monarchy had been proved to be a disaster over and over again for centuries, and now was the time to get rid of it once and for all. There was new restlessness in all the provinces and renewed talk of secession. Having just fought and won a Second War of Reunification, General Cassius Frontinus had no desire to launch immediately into a third one, and he had without much difficulty convinced his brother and Scaevola that the Caesars must go. Must in fact be put where they would never have the opportunity of reclaiming the throne.

  Ruthless and bloody, yes. But better to scrap the incompetent and profligate royal family, better to toss out the empty, costly pomp of Imperial grandeur, better to bring back, at long last, the Republic. Once again there would be government by merit rather than by reason of birth. Scaevola was respected everywhere; he would know the right things to do to hold things together.

  “But to kill them—to murder a whole family—!”

  “A clean sweep, that’s what we needed,” Frontinus tells me. “A total break with the past. We can’t have hereditary monarchs in this modern age.”

  “All the princes and princesses are dead too, then?”

  “So I hear. One or two may actually have gotten away, but they’ll be caught soon enough, you can be sure of that.”

  “The Princess Severina Floriana?”

  “Can’t say,” Frontinus replies. “Why? Did you know her?”

  Color floods to my cheeks. “Not very well, actually. But I couldn’t help wondering—”

  “Lucilla will be able to tell you what happened to her. She and the princess were very close friends. You can ask her yourself.”

  “I don’t know where Lucilla is. We were at Tibur together this week, at the Imperial villa, and then—when everything started happening—”

  “Why, you’ll be seeing Lucilla five minutes from now! She’s at the palace of Count Nero Romulus—you know who he is, don’t you?—and that’s exactly where we’re heading.”

  I point toward the Palatine, shrouded in flames and black gusts of smoke behind us.

  “Up there?”

  Frontinus laughs. “Don’t be silly. Everything’s destroyed on the Palatine. I mean his palace by the river.” We are already past the Forum area. I can see the somber bulk of Hadrianus’s Mausoleum ahead of us, across the river. We halt just on this side of the bridge. “Here we are,” says Frontinus.

  I get to see her one last time, then, once we have made our way through the lunatic frenzy of the streets to the security of Nero Romulus’s well-guarded riverfront palace. I hardly recognize her. Lucilla wears no makeup and her clothing is stark and simple—peasant clothing. Her eyes are somber and red-rimmed. Many of her patrician friends have died this night for the sake of the rebirth of Roma.

  “So now you know,” she says to me. “Of course I couldn’t tell you a thing about what was being planned.”

  It is hard for me to believe that this woman and I were lovers for months, that I am intimately familiar with every inch of her body. Her voice is cool and impersonal, and she has neither kissed me nor smiled at me.

  “You knew—all along—what was going to happen?”

  “Of course. From the start. At least I got you out of town to a safe place while it was going on.”

  “You got Severina to a safe place, too. But you couldn’t keep her there, it seems.”

  Her eyes flare with rage, but I see the pain there, too.

  “I tried to save her. It wasn’t possible. They all had to die, Cymbelin.”

  “Your own childhood friend. And you didn’t even try to warn her.”

  “We’re Romans, Cymbelin. It had become necessary to restore the Republic. The royal family had to die.”

  “Even the women?”

  “All of them. Don’t you think I asked? Begged? No, said Nero Romulus. She’s got to die with them. There’s no choice, he said. I went to my uncle. You don’t know how I fought with him. But nobody can sway his will, nobody at all. No, he said. There’s no way to save her.” Lucilla makes a quick harsh motion with her hand. “I don’t want to talk about this any more. Go away, Cymbelin. I don’t even understand why Marcello brought you here.”

  “I was wandering around in the street, not knowing where to go to find you.”

  “Me? Why would you want to find me?”

  It’s like a blow in the ribs. “Because—because—” I falter and fall still.

  “You were a very amusing companion,” she says. “But the time for amusements is over.”

  “Amusements!”

  Her face is like stone. “Go, Cymbelin. Get yourself back to Britannia, as soon as you can. The bloodshed isn’t finished here. The First Consul doesn’t yet know who’s loyal and who isn’t.”

  “Another Reign of Terror, then?”

  “We hope not. But it won’t be pretty, all the same. Still, the First Consul wants the Second Republic to get off to the most peaceful possible—”

  “The First Consul,” I say, with anger in my voice. “The Second Republic.”

  “You don’t like those words?”

  “To kill the Emperor—”

  “It’s happened before, more times than you can count. This time we’ve killed the whole system. And will replace it at long last with something cleaner and healthier.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Go, Cymbelin. We are very busy now.”

  And she turns away and leaves the room, as though I am nothing to her, only an inquisitive and annoying stranger. It is all too clear to me now that she had regarded me all along as a mere casual plaything, an amusing barbarian to keep by her side during the autumn season; and now it is winter and she must devote herself to more serious things
.

  And so I went. The last Emperor had perished and the Republic had come again, and I had slept amidst the luxurious comforts of the Imperial villa while it all was happening. But it has always been that way, hasn’t it? While most of us sleep, an agile few create history in the night.

  Now all was made new and strange. The world I had known had been entirely transformed in ways that might not be fully apparent for years—the events of these recent hours would be a matter for historians to examine and debate and assess, long after I had grown old and died—nor would the chaos at the center of the Empire end in a single day, and provincial boys like me were well advised to take themselves back where they belonged.

  I no longer had any place here in Roma, anyway. Lucilla was lost to me—she will marry Count Nero Romulus to seal his alliance with her uncle—and whatever dizzying fantasies I might have entertained concerning the Princess Severina Floriana were best forgotten now, or the ache would never leave my soul. All that was done and behind me. The holiday was over. There would be no further tourism for me this year, no ventures into Etruria and Venetia and the other northern regions of Italia. I knew I must leave Roma to the Romans and beat a retreat back to my distant rainy island in the west, having come all too close to the flames that had consumed the Roma of the Emperors, having in fact been somewhat singed by them myself.

  Except for the help that Frontinus provided, I suppose I might have had a hard time of it. But he gave me a safe-conduct pass to get me out of the capital, and lent me a chariot and a charioteer; and on the morning of the second day of the Second Republic I found myself on the Via Appia once more, heading south. Ahead of me lay the Via Roma and Neapolis and a ship to take me home.

  I looked back only once. Behind me the sky was smudged with black clouds as the fires on the Palatine Hill burned themselves out.

  A.U.C. 2650: TALES FROM THE VENIA WOODS

  This all happened a long time ago, in the early decades of the Second Republic, when I was a boy growing up in Upper Pannonia. Life was very simple then, at least for us. We lived in a forest village on the right bank of the Danubius—my parents; my grandmother; my sister, Friya; and I. My father, Tyr, for whom I am named, was a blacksmith, my mother, Julia, taught school in our house, and my grandmother was the priestess at the little Temple of Juno Teutonica nearby.

  It was a very quiet life. The automobile hadn’t yet been invented then—all this was around the year 2650, and we still used horse-drawn carriages or wagons—and we hardly ever left the village. Once a year, on Augustus Day—back then we still celebrated Augustus Day—we would all dress in our finest clothes and my father would get our big iron-bound carriage out of the shed, the one he had built with his own hands, and we’d drive to the great municipium of Venia, a two-hour journey away, to hear the Imperial band playing waltzes in the Plaza of Vespasianus. Afterward there’d be cakes and whipped cream at the big hotel nearby, and tankards of cherry beer for the grownups, and then we’d begin the long trip home. Today, of course, the forest is gone and our little village has been swallowed up by the ever-growing municipium, and it’s a twenty-minute ride by car to the center of the city from where we used to live. But at that time it was a grand excursion, the event of the year for us.

  I know now that Venia is only a minor provincial city, that compared with Londin or Parisi or Urbs Roma itself it’s nothing at all. But to me it was the capital of the world. Its splendors stunned me and dazed me. We would climb to the top of the great column of Basileus Andronicus, which the Greeks put up eight hundred years ago to commemorate their victory over Caesar Maximilianus during the Civil War in the days when the Empire was divided, and we’d stare out at the whole city; and my mother, who had grown up in Venia, would point everything out to us, the Senate building, the opera house, the aqueduct, the university, the ten bridges, the Temple of Jupiter Teutonicus, the proconsul’s palace, the much greater palace that Trajan VII built for himself during that dizzying period when Venia was essentially the second capital of the Empire, and so forth. For days afterward my dreams would glitter with memories of what I had seen in Venia, and my sister and I would hum waltzes as we whirled along the quiet forest paths.

  There was one exciting year when we made the Venia trip twice. That was 2647, when I was ten years old, and I can remember it so exactly because that was the year when the First Consul died—C. Junius Scaevola, I mean, the Founder of the Second Republic. My father was very agitated when the news of his death came. “It’ll be touch and go now, touch and go, mark my words,” he said over and over. I asked my grandmother what he meant by that, and she said, “Your father’s afraid that they’ll bring back the Empire, now that the old man’s dead.” I didn’t see what was so upsetting about that—it was all the same to me, Republic or Empire, Consul or Imperator—but to my father it was a big issue, and when the new First Consul came to Venia later that year, touring the entire vast Imperium province by province for the sake of reassuring everyone that the Republic was stable and intact, my father got out the carriage and we went to attend his Triumph and Processional. So I had a second visit to the capital that year.

  Half a million people, so they say, turned out in downtown Venia to applaud the new First Consul. This was N. Marcellus Turritus, of course. You probably think of him as the fat, bald old man on the coinage of the late twenty-seventh century that still shows up in pocket change now and then, but the man I saw that day—I had just a glimpse of him, a fraction of a second as the Consular chariot rode past, but the memory still blazes in my mind seventy years later—was lean and virile, with a jutting jaw and fiery eyes and dark, thick curling hair. We threw up our arms in the old Roman salute and at the top of our lungs we shouted out to him, “Hail, Marcellus! Long live the Consul!”

  (We shouted it, by the way, not in Latin but in Germanisch. I was very surprised at that. My father explained afterward that it was by the First Consul’s own orders. He wanted to show his love for the people by encouraging all the regional languages, even at a public celebration like this one. The Gallians had hailed him in Gallian, the Britannians in Britannic, the Lusitanians in whatever it is they speak there, and as he traveled through the Teutonic provinces he wanted us to yell his praises in Germanisch. I realize that there are some people today, very conservative Republicans, who will tell you that this was a terrible idea, because it has led to the resurgence of all kinds of separatist regional activities in the Imperium. It was the same sort of regionalist fervor, they remind us, that brought about the crumbling of the Empire a hundred years before. To men like my father, though, it was a brilliant political stroke, and he cheered the new First Consul with tremendous Germanische exuberance and vigor. But my father managed to be a staunch regionalist and a staunch Republican at the same time. Bear in mind that over my mother’s fierce objections he had insisted on naming his children for ancient Teutonic gods instead of giving them the standard Roman names that everybody else in Pannonia favored then.)

  Other than going to Venia once a year, or on this one occasion twice, I never went anywhere. I hunted, I fished, I swam, I helped my father in the smithy, I helped my grandmother in the Temple, I studied reading and writing in my mother’s school. Sometimes Friya and I would go wandering in the forest, which in those days was dark and lush and mysterious. And that was how I happened to meet the last of the Caesars.

  There was supposed to be a haunted house deep in the woods. Marcus Aurelius Schwarzchild it was who got me interested in it, the tailor’s son, a sly and unlikable boy with a cast in one eye. He said it had been a hunting lodge in the time of the Caesars, and that the bloody ghost of an Emperor who had been killed in a hunting accident could be seen at noontime, the hour of his death, pursuing the ghost of a wolf around and around the building. “I’ve seen it myself,” he said. “The ghost of the Emperor, I mean. He had a laurel wreath on, and everything, and his rifle was polished so it shined like gold.”

  I didn’t believe him. I didn’t think he’d had the cour
age to go anywhere near the haunted house and certainly not that he’d seen the ghost. Marcus Aurelius Schwarzchild was the sort of boy you wouldn’t believe if he said it was raining, even if you were getting soaked to the skin right as he was saying it. For one thing, I didn’t believe in ghosts, not very much. My father had told me it was foolish to think that the dead still lurked around in the world of the living. For another, I asked my grandmother if there had ever been an Emperor killed in a hunting accident in our forest, and she laughed and said no, not ever: the Imperial Guard would have razed the village to the ground and burned down the woods, if that had ever happened.

  But nobody doubted that the house itself, haunted or not, was really there. Everyone in the village knew that. It was said to be in a certain dark part of the woods where the trees were so old that their branches were tightly woven together. Hardly anyone ever went there. The house was just a ruin, they said, and haunted besides, definitely haunted, so it was best to leave it alone.

  It occurred to me that the place might just actually have been an Imperial hunting lodge, and that if it had been abandoned hastily after some unhappy incident and never visited since, it might still have some trinkets of the Caesars in it, little statuettes of the gods, or cameos of the royal family, things like that. My grandmother collected small ancient objects of that sort. Her birthday was coming, and I wanted a nice gift for her. My fellow villagers might be timid about poking around in the haunted house, but why should I be? I didn’t believe in ghosts, after all.

  But on second thought I didn’t particularly want to go there alone. This wasn’t cowardice so much as sheer common sense, which even then I possessed in full measure. The woods were full of exposed roots hidden under fallen leaves; if you tripped on one and hurt your leg, you would lie there a long time before anyone who might help you came by. You were also less likely to lose your way if you had someone else with you who could remember trail marks. And there was some occasional talk of wolves. I figured the probability of my meeting one wasn’t much better than the likelihood of ghosts, but all the same it seemed like a sensible idea to have a companion with me in that part of the forest. So I took my sister along.