Robert Silverberg: Waiting for the End

The uglier of the two Praetorians, flat-faced and gruff, with close-cropped red hair and thick Slavic cheekbones, said, “The Emperor wants you, Antipater. Has some work for you, he says.”

“Translation work,” said the prettier guardsman, a ringleted blond Gaul. “The latest little love note from our friends the Greeks, I guess. Or maybe he wants you to write one for him to them.” He gave Antipater a flirtatious little wink-and-wriggle, mock-seductive. The Praetorians all thought Antipater was of that sort, probably because he had such a sleek, well-oiled Levantine look about him, but perhaps merely because he was fluent in Greek. They were wrong, though. He was a slim-hipped, dusky-skinned, dark-haired man of somewhat feline gait and undeniably Eastern appearance, yes, but that was simply an artifact of his ancestry, the heritage of his long-ago Syrian forefathers. His understanding of Greek was a requirement of his job, not an advertisement of his sexual tastes. But he was at least as Roman as either of them. And as for his preference for women’s embraces, they need only ask Justina Botaniates, to name just one.

“Where is His Majesty now?” Antipater asked coolly.

“The Emerald Office,” replied the Slav. “Greek Letters, he said. Get me the Master of Greek Letters.” He glanced at his companion and his broad face writhed in a heavy grin. “We’ll all be masters of Greek letters soon enough, won’t we, Marius?”

“Those of us who can read and write, at any rate,” said the Gaul. “Eh? Eh?—Well, get along with you now, Antipater! Don’t keep Caesar waiting!”

They had no respect. They were crude men. Antipater was a high palatine official and they were mere soldiers, and they had no business ordering him about. He glared them down and they backed away, and he gathered up his tablets and stylus and went down the dimly lit halls of the palace annex to the tunnel that led to the main building, and thence to the row of small private offices—Emerald, Scarlet, Indigo, Topaz—clustered along the east side of the Great Hall of Audience. The Emerald Office, the farthest in the series, was the Emperor Maximilianus’s favorite, a long narrow windowless room hung with draperies of Indian weave, dark-green in hue, on which scenes of men with spears hunting elephants and tigers and other fantastic creatures were depicted.

“Lucius Aelius Antipater,” he told the guard on duty, a vacant-eyed boy of eighteen or so, whom he had never seen before. “Master of Greek Letters to Caesar.” The boy nodded him on through, not even bothering with the routine check for concealed weapons.

Antipater wondered about today’s assignment. An outgoing letter, he supposed. In these dark days, three or four went out for every one that came in. Yet what was there to write about, with the Greek army on the verge of pouring across the Western Empire’s porously defended frontiers? Surely not still another stern ultimatum addressed to Roma’s great enemy the Basileus Andronicus, ordering him to cease and desist at once from further military encroachment on the Imperial domain. They had sent the latest in the long series of such ultimatums only last week. The courier most likely was no farther east with it yet than Macedonia, certainly was still a long way from delivering it to the Basileus in Constantinopolis—where it would only be tossed aside with a snort of amusement, like all the rest.

No, Antipater decided. This one had to be something more unusual. A letter from Caesar to some slippery Byzantine lordling on the African coast of the Great Sea, say—the exarch of Alexandria, maybe, or of Carthage—urging him, with the promise of immense bribes, to defect to the Roman side and launch some surprise attack from the rear, one that would distract Andronicus long enough for Roma to recover its balance and mobilize its long overdue counterthrust against the invaders.

A wild stratagem indeed. Nobody but he would ever think of it. “The trouble with you, Lucius Aelius,” Justina liked to tell him, “is that you have too much imagination for your own good.”

Maybe so. But here he was, just thirty-two years old that year—which was the year 1951 since the founding of the city—and for two years now he had been a member of the high palatinate, the Emperor’s inner circle. Caesar had already bestowed a knighthood on him and a seat in the Senate would surely be next. Not bad going for a poor lad from the provinces. A pity that he had achieved his spectacular rise to prominence just as the Empire itself, weakened by its own senseless imprudence, seemed to be about to collapse.

“Caesar?” he said, peering into the Emerald Office.

At first Antipater saw no one. Then, by the smoky light of two dim tapers burning in a far corner of the room, he perceived the Emperor at his desk, the venerable Imperial desk of dark exotic woods that had been occupied in the past by the likes of Aemilius Magnus and Metellus Domitius and Publius Clemens and, for all Antipater knew, by Augustus and Hadrianus and Diocletianus as well. Great Caesars all; but the huge curving desk seemed to swallow their current successor, a pallid wiry little man with a glint of wholly justified worry in his close-set, sea-green, brightly shining eyes. He was wearing a simple gray jerkin and a peasant’s red leggings; only the faint thread of pearls running along one shoulder, flanked by a pair of purple stripes, indicated that his rank was anything out of the ordinary.

He bore a grand name, did Maximilianus. It had been Maximilianus III, Maximilianus the Great, who in his short but brilliant reign had beaten the troublesome barbarians of the north into submission once and for all, the Huns and Goths and Vandals and the rest of that unruly shaggy-haired crowd. But that had been almost seven hundred years ago, and this Maximilianus, Maximilianus VI, possessed none of his famous namesake’s fire and drive. Once again the Empire was at risk, tottering on the brink, in truth, as it had seemed to be in that other Maximilianus’s far-off time. But this latter-day Maximilianus was not very likely to be its savior.

“You summoned me, Caesar?”

“Oh, Antipater. Yes. Look at this, Antipater.” The Emperor held a yellow vellum scroll out toward him. So what needed translation was an incoming document of some sort, then. Antipater noticed that the Emperor’s hand was quivering.

The Emperor, as a matter of fact, seemed to have turned overnight into a palsied old man. There were tics and tremors all over him. And he was only fifty, too. But he had held the throne for twenty grueling years, now, and his reign had been a hard one from its very first hour, when news of his father’s death had reached him virtually at the same moment as word of the Greek thrust westward into the African proconsular region. That African invasion was the first major escalation of what had until then been a slow-burning border dispute confined to the province of Dalmatia, a dispute that had blossomed, through subsequent Greek probes along the border separating the two empires, into a full-scale war between East and West that now seemed to be entering its final dismal phase.

Antipater unrolled the scroll and began quickly to scan it.

“This was intercepted at sea by one of our patrols,” said the Emperor. “Just south of Sardinia. Greek ship, it was, disguised as a fishing vessel, sailing northward out of Sicilia. I can understand some of what the message says, of course—”

“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.