Стивен Сейлор - The Throne of Caesar

“This way!” I shouted to Cinna, grabbing his arm.

I had spotted the round roof of the Temple of Vesta, as good a place to flee to as any other. We doggedly strove toward it and began to make progress as the crush of the crowd relented slightly. For the first time since the riot had started I felt able to breathe again. The air I desperately sucked in carried less smoke than before, though now I caught a whiff of something else, quite aromatic—the unmistakable scent produced by burning myrrh.

We had almost reached the Temple of Vesta. The crowd grew thinner. Every person we encountered was running in the opposite direction, toward the surging mob and the pyre. It seemed that only we two were attempting to flee.

I stopped to look behind us, hoping that Davus and Cinna’s bodyguard had somehow managed to follow us, but I didn’t see them. How dearly I longed to see my hulking son-in-law at that moment !

From nearby—from what direction I couldn’t tell, for the surrounding walls of marble created strange echoes—a gruff, husky voice cried, “Cinna! It’s him! Look, there he is! There is Cinna!”

Cinna also heard and glanced around. On his face I was the insipid look of pleasure one sees so often on the faces of politicians and actors when they are recognized in public. He smiled as he continued to search for the speaker. “Can it be, even here, amid such frenzy—a poetry lover?” he said, and then more loudly, raising one hand in a friendly wave, “Yes, it is I, Cinna!”

I turned around again and now saw a hooded group approaching from the direction we had come. There were at least twenty of them, perhaps twice that many, perhaps even more—their dark cloaks and hoods made them blend together in a single faceless mass. Cinna, too, saw the group approaching and gave them a broad smile. I reached for his waving arm, thinking to hold him back, but he stepped away from me. Sensing danger, I reached for him again—and the next moment I was somehow on the hard, paved ground, and the world was spinning around me.

My head was struck a second time. The world grew dim.

I didn’t lose consciousness entirely—so I later came to think. It seemed to me that I continued to see and hear what was happening around me, but imperfectly, and in flashes, as if the world was suddenly a dark place lit only by lightning, while a continuous peal of thunder muffled all other sounds. I could make no sense of what was happening. Time and space were all askew. I was stunned, frightened, and very confused.

Looking up from the ground, I saw Cinna nearby, then did not see him as he was surrounded by the figures in dark cloaks and hoods. My view of those figures was foreshortened, creating the strange illusion that it was children whom I saw all around us; the hooded figures seemed weirdly small. Could they really all be poetry lovers, mobbing Cinna as one sometimes sees theatergoers mob a famous actor?

Then I heard the same husky voice I had heard before, shouting, “It’s him, all right! It’s Cinna! The praetor who spoke ill of Caesar the other day and praised his killers! Tear him to pieces! ”

Though I could no longer see him, I heard Cinna wailing, as if from some great distance, or as if he had fallen down a well: “No, no, no! You have the wrong man! I’m Cinna the poet, not Cinna the praetor! I make verses!”

Some old crone must have been among the rioters, for I heard a cackling voice cry out, “Tear him for his bad verses, then!”

No! I wanted to cry. You have the wrong man! This is a horrible mistake! It’s the other Cinna you’re thinking of! But as the dark world continued to swirl unsteadily about me, I found it impossible to speak. Then, for a moment or two, perhaps I did lose consciousness entirely, for the next thing I saw was something from a nightmare—the severed head of Cinna held aloft by a clawlike hand, dripping blood and gore from the torn neck. On my friend’s face was a look of utter shock—his mouth gaped and his eyes were wide open, showing white all around the huge pupils. Then I saw something even more horrible—the lips of his mouth moved, as if trying to speak, and his eyes blinked, not once but several times in quick succession. What did Cinna see? What was he trying to say?

I heard screams—not from Cinna’s killers but from other people who had stumbled on the scene and turned to flee in terror. No, don’t leave us! I tried to cry out. Come back! Come back! Help us, please! But my numb, useless mouth made no more noise than the moving lips of Cinna.

Amid the swarm of dark cloaks I saw blood fly through the air—ribbons of blood, jets of blood in all directions. It seemed to me the sky had burst open and was raining blood.

The head of Cinna, still held aloft, was now joined by what appeared to be a severed hand, clutched by a gnarled, hardly human claw covered with blood. Then other parts of Cinna’s body appeared, raised high in the air like trophies—another severed hand, something that looked like a forearm, a foot, a stump of flesh that might have been part of his leg, all awash with blood and gore, as were the hands that clutched them. When I saw his severed genitals held aloft, my mind reeled in disbelief. The horror of what I was seeing, the sheer savagery, could not be real. This had to be some hideous fantasy from my darkest nightmare, or some terrible vision conjured up by witchcraft. Or was I dying? Or already dead? Was this the world of the unliving, a place of horrors beyond imagining?

Now the swarming assailants abruptly seemed to grow even smaller—but this was another illusion. It was not they who dwindled but the head of Cinna that suddenly rose higher in the air, mounted above them on a spear. Up and down it bobbed, and from side to side, like some ghastly puppet looming above me. I thought of Caesar’s effigy, held aloft for the crowd by Antony—but this was no semblance of the dead, it was the dead man himself. Looking up at his face, I shivered in disbelief. Could what I saw be true—that Cinna’s lips still moved and his eyes still blinked?

I heard more screams, but not all were cries of terror. Some people seemed to be screaming in a frenzy of delight. I also heard laughter, and applause, as if the scene I witnessed came from some hilarious comedy.

“Cinna the praetor!” someone shouted. “They came upon Cinna the praetor and look what they’ve done! Ripped off his head and torn the bastard to pieces!”

“No more than he deserves!” shouted another man.

Out of this cacophony of taunts and shouts, I gradually perceived a chant taken up by the mob:

“I’m glad he’s dead,” Cinna said.

Now look what’s left—Just his head!

Over and over they chanted this doggerel, as the head on a spear spun about and bobbed in time, facing one way and the other, then sped off in the direction we had come, back toward the funeral pyre. From the distant mob I heard rolling peals of laughter and screams as the head made its way toward the center of the Forum. Louder and louder, echoing off marble walls, I heard the chant:

“I’m glad he’s dead,” Cinna said.

Now look what’s left—Just his head !

Thousands were chanting it. I pictured the funeral pyre with Caesar’s blazing corpse amid the surging mass of angry mourners, and amid the throng the bobbing head of Cinna and the effigy of Caesar, like two puppets meant to amuse children at some mad festival of death.

How Cinna would have despised that vulgar ditty! How unthinkable that such vile doggerel should celebrate the death of Rome’s greatest poet!

I somehow managed to get to my hands and knees. Nearby I saw the crumpled, tattered remains of the dark tunic Cinna had been wearing. It was completely soaked with blood, and blood was everywhere on the paving stones. His head, I knew, was gone—but where was the rest of him? There was nothing of his corpse to be seen. Except for the tunic and the blood, and a few bits of slime and gore, no trace of him remained.