Roma Eterna Read online

  Close behind the priests came a procession of deformed clowns, squinting hunchbacked men who also were carrying whips, but only pretending to use them on each other. Maximilianus flung them a handful of coins, and Menandros did the same, and they broke formation at once, scrabbling enthusiastically in the dimness to scoop them up. On the far side of them the Hebrew pointed out a chamber that he identified as a chapel of Priapus, and Menandros was all for investigating it; but this time Maximilianus said swiftly, “I think that is for another day, your excellence. One should be in fresh condition for such amusements, and you must be tired, now, after this long first journey through the netherworld.”

  The ambassador looked unhappy. Faustus wondered whose will would prevail: that of the visiting diplomat, whose whims ought to be respected, or of the Emperor’s son, who did not expect to be gainsaid. But after a moment’s hesitation Menandros agreed that it was time to go back above. Perhaps he saw the wisdom of checking his voracious curiosity for a little while, or else simply that of yielding to the prince’s request.

  “There is an exit ramp over there,” bar-Heap said, pointing to his right. With surprising speed they emerged into the open. Night had fallen. The sweet cool air seemed, as ever upon emerging, a thousand times fresher and more nourishing than that of the world below. Faustus was amused to see that they were not far from the Baths of Constantinus, only a few hundred yards from where they had gone in, although his legs were aching fiercely, as though he had covered many leagues that day. They must have traveled in an enormous circle, he decided.

  He yearned for his own bath, and a decent dinner, and a massage afterward and the Numidian girl.

  Maximilianus, with an Imperial prince’s casual arrogance, hailed a passing litter that bore Senatorial markings, and requisitioned its use for his own purposes. Its occupant, a balding man whom Faustus recognized by face but could not name, hastened to comply, scuttling away into the night without protest. Faustus and Menandros and the Caesar clambered aboard, while the Hebrew, with no more farewell than an irreverent offhand wave, vanished into the darkness of the streets.

  There was no message waiting at home for Faustus to tell him that Prince Heraclius was heading back to the city. He had been hoping for such news. Tomorrow would be another exhausting day spent underground, then.

  He slept badly, though the little Numidian did her best to soothe his nerves.

  This time they entered the Underworld farther to the west, between the column of Marcus Aurelius and the Temple of Isis and Sarapis. That was, bar-Heap said, the quickest way to reach the marketplace of the sorcerers, which Menandros had some particular interest in seeing.

  Diligent guide that he was, the Hebrew showed them all the notable landmarks along the way: the Whispering Gallery, where even the faintest of sounds traveled enormous distances, and the Baths of Pluto, a series of steaming thermal pools that gave off a foul sulphurous reek but nevertheless abounded in patrons even here at midday, and the River Styx nearby it, the black subterranean stream that followed a rambling course through the underground city until it emerged into the Tiber just upstream from the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer.

  “Truly, the Styx?” Menandros asked, with a credulity Faustus had not expected of him.

  “We call it that,” said bar-Heap. “Because it is the river of our Underworld, you see. But the true one is somewhere in your own eastern realm, I think. Here—we must turn—”

  A jagged, irregularly oval aperture in the passageway wall proved to be the entrance to the great hall that served as the sorcerers’ marketplace. Originally, so they said, it had been intended as a storage vault for the Imperial chariots, to keep them from being seized by invading barbarians. When such precautions had turned out to be unnecessary, the big room had been taken over by a swarm of sorcerers, who divided it by rows of pumice-clad arches into a collection of small low-walled chambers. An octagonal light-well, high overhead in the very center of the roof of the hall, allowed pale streams of sunlight to filter down from the street above, but most of the marketplace’s illumination came from the smoky braziers in front of each stall. These, whether by some enchantment or mere technical skill, all burned with gaudy many-hued flames, and dancing strands of violet and pale crimson and cobalt blue and brilliant emerald mingled with the more usual reds and yellows of a charcoal fire.

  The roar of commerce rose up on every side. Each of the sorcerers’ stalls had its barker, crying the merits of his master’s wares. Scarcely had the ambassador Menandros entered the room than one of these, a fat, sweaty-faced man wearing a brocaded robe of Syrian style, spied him as a likely mark, beckoning him inward with both arms while calling out, “Eh, there, you dear little fellow: what about a love spell today, an excellent inflamer, the finest of its kind?”

  Menandros indicated interest. The barker said, “Come, then, let me show you this splendid wizardry! It attracts men to women, women to men, and makes virgins rush out of their homes to find lovers!” He reached behind him, snatched up a rolled parchment scroll, and waved it in front of Menandros’s nose. “Here, friend, here! You take a pure papyrus and write on it, with the blood of an ass, the magical words contained on this. Then you put in a hair of the woman you desire, or a snip of her clothing, or a bit of her bedsheet—acquire it however you may. And then you smear the papyrus with a bit of vinegar gum, and stick it to the wall of her house, and you will marvel! But watch that you are not struck yourself, or you may find yourself bound by the chains of love to some passing drover, or to his donkey, perhaps, or even worse! Three sesterces! Three!”

  “If infallible love is to be had so cheaply,” Maximilianus said to the man, “why is it that languishing lovers hurl themselves into the river every day of the week?”

  “And also why is it that the whorehouses are kept so busy,” added Faustus, “when for three brass coins anyone can have the woman of his dreams?”

  “Or the man,” said Menandros. “For this charm will work both ways, so he tells us.”

  “Or on a donkey,” put in Danielus bar-Heap, and they laughed and passed onward.

  Nearby, a spell of invisibility was for sale, at a price of two silver denarii. “It is the simplest thing,” insisted the barker, a small lean man tight as a coiled spring, whose swarthy sharp-chinned face was marked by the scars of some ancient knife fight. “Take a night-owl’s eye and a ball of the dung of the beetles of Aegyptus and the oil of an unripe olive and grind them all together until smooth, and smear your whole body with it, and then go to the nearest shrine of the lord Apollo by dawn’s first light and utter the prayer that this parchment will give you. And you will be invisible to all eyes until sunset and can go unnoticed among the ladies at their baths, or slip into the palace of the Emperor and help yourself to delicacies from his table, or fill your purse with gold from the moneychangers’ tables. Two silver denarii, only!”

  “Quite reasonable, for a day’s invisibility,” Menandros said. “I’ll have it, for my master’s delight.” And reached for his purse; but the Caesar, catching him by the wrist, warned him never to accept the quoted first price in a place like this. Menandros shrugged, as though to point out that the price asked was only a trifle, after all. But to the Caesar Maximilianus there was an issue of principle here. He invoked the aid of bar-Heap, who quickly bargained the fee down to four copper dupondii, and, since Menandros did not have coins as small as that in his purse, it was Faustus who handed over the price.

  “You have done well,” the barker said, giving the Greek his bit of parchment. Menandros, turning away, opened it. “The letters are Greek,” he said.

  Maximilianus nodded. “Yes. Most of this trash is set out in Greek. It is the language of magic, here.”

  “The letters are Greek,” said Menandros, “but not the words. Listen.” And he read out in a rolling resonant tone: “‘BORKE PHOIOUR IO ZIZIA APARXEOUCH THYTHE LAILAM AAAAAA IIII OOOO IEO IEO IEO.’” Then he looked up from the scroll. “And there are three more lines, of much the sa
me sort. What do you make of that, my friends?”

  “I think it is well that you didn’t read any more of it,” said Faustus, “or you might have disappeared right before our noses.”

  “Not without employing the beetle dung and the owl’s eye and the rest,” bar-Heap observed. “Nor is that dawn’s first light coming down that shaft, even if you would pretend that this is Apollo’s temple.”

  “‘IO IO O PHRIXRIZO EOA,’” Menandros read, and giggled in pleasure, and rolled the scroll and put it in his purse.

  It did not appear likely to Faustus that the Greek was a believer in this nonsense, as his earlier eagerness to visit this marketplace had led him to suspect. Yet he was an enthusiastic buyer. Doubtless he was merely looking for quaint souvenirs to bring back to his Emperor in Constantinopolis—entertaining examples of modern-day Roman gullibility. For Menandros must surely have noticed by this time an important truth about this room, which was that nearly all the sorcerers and their salesmen were citizens of the Eastern half of the Empire, which had a reputation for magic going back to the distant days of the Pharaohs and the kings of Babylon, while the customers—and there were plenty of them—all were Romans of the West. Surely spells of this sort would be widely available in the other Empire. This stuff would be nothing new to Easterners. It was an oily place, the Eastern Empire. All the mercantile skills had been invented there. The East’s roots went deep down into antiquity, into a time long before Roma itself ever was, and one needed to keep a wary eye out in any dealings with its citizens.

  So Menandros was just trying to collect evidence of Roman silliness, yes. Using bar-Heap to beat the prices down for him, he went from booth to booth, gathering up the merchandise. He acquired instructions for fashioning a ring of power that would permit one to get whatever one asks from anybody, or to calm the anger of masters and kings. He bought a charm to induce wakefulness, and another to bring on sleep. He got a lengthy scroll that offered a whole catalog of mighty mysteries, and gleefully read from it to them: “‘You will see the doors thrown open, and seven virgins coming from deep within, dressed in linen garments, and with the faces of asps. They are called the Fates of Heaven and wield golden wands. When you see them, greet them in this manner—’” He found a spell that necromancers could use to keep skulls from speaking out of turn while their owners were using them in the casting of spells; he found one that would summon the Headless One who had created earth and heaven, the mighty Osoronnophris, and conjure Him to expel demons from a sufferer’s body; he found one that would bring back lost or stolen property; he went back to the first booth and bought the infallible love potion, for a fraction of the original asking price; and, finally, picked up one that would cause one’s fellow drinkers at a drinking party to think that they had grown the snouts of apes.

  At last, well satisfied with his purchases, Menandros said he was willing to move on. At the far end of the hall, beyond the territory of the peddlers of spells, they paused at the domain of the soothsayers and augurs. “For a copper or two,” Faustus told the Greek, “they will look at the palm of your hand, or the pattern of lines on your forehead, and tell you your future. For a higher price they will examine the entrails of chickens or the liver of a sheep, and tell you your true future. Or even the future of the Empire itself.”

  Menandros looked astonished. “The future of the Empire? Common diviners in a public marketplace offer prophecies of a sort like that? I’d think only the Imperial augurs would deal in such news, and only for the Emperor’s ear.”

  “The Imperial augurs provide more reliable information, I suppose,” said Faustus. “But this is Roma, where everything is for sale to anyone.” He looked down the row and saw the one who had claimed new knowledge of the Sibylline prophecies and foretold the imminent end of the Empire—an old man, unmistakably Roman, not a Greek or any other kind of foreigner, with faded blue eyes and a lengthy, wispy white beard. “Over there is one of the most audacious of our seers, for instance,” Faustus said, pointing. “For a fee he will tell you that our time of Empire is nearly over, that a year is coming soon when the seven planets will meet at Capricorn and the entire universe will be consumed by fire.”

  “The great ekpyrosis,” Menandros said. “We have the same prophecy. What does he base his calculations on, I wonder?”

  “What does it matter?” cried Maximilianus, in a burst of sudden unconcealed rage. “It is all foolishness!”

  “Perhaps so,” Faustus said gently. And, to Menandros, whose curiosity about the old man and his apocalyptic predictions still was apparent: “It has something to do with the old tale of King Romulus and the twelve eagles that passed overhead on the day he and his brother Remus fought over the proper location for the city of Roma.”

  “They were twelve vultures, I thought,” said bar-Heap.

  Faustus shook his head. “No. Eagles, they were. And the prophecy of the Sibyl is that Roma will endure for twelve Great Years of a hundred years each, one for each of Romulus’s eagles, and one century more beyond that. This is the year 1282 since the founding. So we have eighteen years left, says the long-bearded one over there.”

  “This is all atrocious foolishness,” said Maximilianus again, his eyes blazing.

  “May we speak with this man a moment, even so?” Menandros asked.

  The Caesar most plainly did not want to go near him. But his guest’s mild request could hardly be refused. Faustus saw Maximilianus struggling with his anger as they walked toward the soothsayer’s booth, and with some effort putting it aside. “Here is a visitor to our city,” said Maximilianus to the old man in a clenched voice, “who wants to hear what you’ve to say concerning the impending fiery end of Roma. Name your price and tell him your fables.”

  But the soothsayer shrank back, trembling in fear. “No, Caesar. I pray you, let me be!”

  “You recognize me, do you?”

  “Who would not recognize the Emperor’s son? Especially one whose profession it is to pierce all veils.”

  “You’ve pierced mine, certainly. But why do I frighten you so? I mean you no harm. Come, man, my friend here is a Greek from Justinianus’s court, full of questions for you about the terrible doom that shortly will be heading our way. Speak your piece, will you?” Maximilianus pulled out his purse and drew a shining gold piece from it. “A fine newly minted aureus, is that enough to unseal your lips? Two? Three?”

  It was a fortune. But the man seemed paralyzed with terror. He moved back in his booth, shivering, now, almost on the verge of collapse. The blood had drained from his face and his pale blue eyes were bulging and rigid. It was asking too much of him, Faustus supposed, to be compelled to speak of the approaching destruction of the world to the Emperor’s actual son.

  “Enough,” Faustus murmured. “You’ll scare the poor creature to death, Maximilianus.”

  But the Caesar was bubbling with fury. “No! Here’s gold for him! Let him speak! Let him speak!”

  “Caesar, I will speak to you, if you like,” said a high-pitched, sharp-edged voice from behind them. “And will tell you such things as are sure to please your ears.”

  It was another soothsayer, a ratty little squint-faced man in a tattered yellow tunic, who now made so bold as to pluck at the edge of Maximilianus’s toga. He had cast an augury for Maximilianus just now upon seeing the Caesar’s entry into the marketplace, he said, and would not even ask a fee for it. No, not so much as two coppers for the news he had to impart. Not even one.

  “Not interested,” Maximilianus said brusquely, and turned away.

  But the little diviner would not accept the rebuff. With frantic squirrelly energy he ran around Maximilianus’s side to face him again and said, with the reckless daring of the utterly insignificant confronting the extremely grand, “I threw the bones, Caesar, and they showed me your future. It is a glorious one. You will be one of Roma’s greatest heroes! Men will sing your praises for centuries to come.”

  Instantly a bright blaze of fury lit Maximilianus’
s entire countenance. Faustus had never seen the prince so incensed. “Do you dare to mock me to my face?” the Caesar demanded, his voice so thick with wrath that he could barely get the words out. His right arm quivered and jerked as though he were struggling to keep it from lashing out in rage. “A hero, you say! A hero! A hero!” If the little man had spat in his face it could not have maddened him more.

  But the soothsayer persisted. “Yes, my lord, a great general, who will shatter the barbarian armies like so many empty husks! You will march against them at the head of a mighty force not long after you become Emperor, and—”

  That was too much for the prince. “Emperor, too!” Maximilianus bellowed, and in that same moment struck out wildly at the man, a fierce backhanded blow that sent him reeling against the bench where the other soothsayer, the old bearded one, still was cowering. Then, stepping forward, Maximilianus caught the little man by the shoulder and slapped him again and again, back, forth, back, forth, knocking his head from side to side until blood poured from his mouth and nose and his eyes began to glaze over. Faustus, frozen at first in sheer amazement, moved in after a time to intervene. “Maximilianus!” he said, trying to catch the Caesar’s flailing arm. “My lord—I beg you—it is not right, my lord—”

  He signaled to bar-Heap, and the Hebrew caught Maximilianus’s other arm. Together they pulled him back.

  There was sudden silence in the hall. The sorcerers and their employees had ceased their work and were staring in astonishment and horror, as was Menandros.

  The ragged little soothsayer, sprawling now in a kind of daze against the bench, spat out a tooth and said, in a kind of desperate defiance, “Even so, your majesty, it is the truth: Emperor.”

  It was all that Faustus and the Hebrew could manage to get the prince away from there without his doing further damage.