Robert Silverberg - With Caesar in the Underworld

He closed his own eyes a moment, nodded, smiled. Let what will come come, he thought. Whatsoever it may be.

They ended their day in the Underworld soon afterward. Maximilianus’s savage outburst in the hall of the soothsayers seemed to have placed a damper on everything, even Menandros’s previously insatiable desire to explore the infinite crannies of the underground caverns.

It was near sundown when Faustus reached his chambers, having promised Menandros that he would dine with him later at the ambassador’s lodgings in the Severan Palace. A surprise was waiting for him. Prince Heraclius had indeed gone to his hunting lodge, not to the frontier, and the message that Faustus had sent to him there had actually reached him. The prince was even now on his way back to Roma, arriving this very evening, and wished to meet with the emissary from Justinianus as soon as possible.

Hurriedly Faustus bathed and dressed in formal costume. The Numidian girl was ready and waiting, but Faustus dismissed her, and told his equerry that he would not require her services later in the evening, either.

“A curious day,” Menandros said, when Faustus arrived.

“It was, yes,” said Faustus.

“Your friend the Caesar was greatly distressed by that man’s talk of his becoming Emperor some day. Is the idea so distasteful to him?”

“It’s not something he gives any thought to at all, becoming Emperor. Heraclius will be Emperor. That’s never been in doubt. He’s the older by six years: he was well along in training for the throne when Maximilianus was born, and has always been treated by everyone as his father’s successor. Maximilianus sees no future for himself in any way different from the life he leads now. He’s never looked upon himself as a potential ruler.”

“Yet the Senate could name either brother as Emperor, is that not so?”

“The Senate could name me as Emperor, if it chose. Or even you. In theory, as you surely know, there’s nothing hereditary about it. In practice things are different. Heraclius’s way to the throne is clear. Besides, Maximilianus doesn’t want to be Emperor. Being Emperor is hard work, and Maximilianus has never worked at anything in his life. I think that’s what upset him so much today, the mere thought that he somehow would have to be Emperor, some day.”

Faustus knew Menandros well enough by now to be able to detect the barely masked disdain that these words of his produced. Menandros understood what an Emperor was supposed to be: a man like that severe and ruthless soldier Justinianus, who held sway from Dacia and Thrace to the borders of Persia, and from the frosty northern shores of the Pontic Sea to some point far down in torrid Africa, exerting command over everything and everyone, the whole complex crazyquilt that was the Eastern Empire, with the merest flick of an eye. Whereas here, in the ever flabbier West, which was about to ask Justinianus’s help in fighting off its own long-time enemies, the reigning Emperor was currently ill and invisible, the heir to the throne was so odd that he was capable of slipping out of town just as Justinianus’s ambassador was arriving to discuss the very alliance the West so urgently needed, and the man second in line to the Empire cared so little for the prospect of attaining the Imperial grandeur that he would thrash someone half his size for merely daring to suggest he might.

He sees us of the West as next to worthless, Faustus thought. And perhaps he is correct.

This was not a profitable discussion. Faustus cut it short by telling him that Prince Heraclius would return that very evening.

“Ah, then,” said Menandros, “affairs must be settling down on your northern frontier. Good.”

Faustus did not think it was his duty to explain that the Caesar couldn’t possibly have made the round trip to the frontier and back in so few days, that in fact he had merely been away at his hunting lodge in the countryside. Heraclius would be quite capable of achieving his own trivialization without Faustus’s assistance.

Instead Faustus gave orders for their dinner to be served. They had just reached the last course, the fruits and sherbets, when a messenger entered with word that Prince Heraclius was now in Roma, and awaited the presence of the ambassador from Constantinopolis in the Hall of Marcus Anastasius at the Imperial palace.

The closest part of the five-hundred-year-old string of buildings that was the Imperial compound was no more than ten minutes’ walk from where they were now. But Heraclius, with his usual flair for the inappropriate gesture, had chosen for the place of audience not his own residential quarters, which were relatively near by, but the huge, echoing chamber where the Great Council of State ordinarily met, far over on the palace’s northern side at the very crest of the Palatine Hill. Faustus had two litters brought to take them up there.

The prince had boldly stationed himself on the throne-like seat at the upper end of the chamber that the Emperor used during meetings of the Council. He sat there now with Imperial haughtiness, waiting in silence while Menandros undertook the endless unavoidable ambassadorial plod across the enormous room, with Faustus hulking along irritatedly behind him. For one jarring instant Faustus wondered whether the old Emperor had actually, unbeknownst to him, died during the day, and the reason Heraclius was in Roma was that he had hurried back to take his father’s place. But someone surely would have said something to him in that case, Faustus thought.

Menandros knew his job. He knelt before the prince and made the appropriate gesticulation. When he rose, Heraclius had risen also and was holding forth his hand, which bore an immense carnelian ring, to be kissed. Menandros kissed the prince’s ring. The ambassador made a short, graceful speech expressing his greetings and the best wishes of the Emperor Justinianus for the good health of his royal colleague the Emperor Maximilianus, and for that of his royal son the Caesar Heraclius, and offered thanks for the hospitality that had been rendered him thus far. He gave credit warmly to Faustus but—quite shrewdly, Faustus thought—did not mention the role of Prince Maximilianus at all.

Heraclius listened impassively. He seemed jittery and remote, more so, even, than he ordinarily was.

Faustus had never felt any love for the Imperial heir. Heraclius was a stiff, tense person, ill at ease under the best of circumstances: a short, slight, inconsequential figure of a man with none of his younger brother’s easy athleticism. He was cold-eyed, too, thin-lipped, humorless. It was hard to see him as his father’s son. The Emperor Maximilianus, in earlier days, had looked much the way the prince his namesake did today: a tall, slender, handsome man with glinting russet hair and smiling blue eyes. Heraclius, though, was dark-haired, where he still had hair at all, and his eyes were dark as coals, glowering under heavy brows out of his pale, expressionless face.

The meeting was inconclusive. The prince and the ambassador both understood that this first encounter was not the time to begin any discussion of the royal marriage or the proposed East-West military alliance, but even so Faustus was impressed by the sheer vacuity of the conversation. Heraclius asked if Menandros cared to attend the gladiatorial games the following week, said a sketchy thing or two about his Etruscan ancestors and their religious beliefs, of which he claimed to be a student of sorts, and spoke briefly of some idiotic Greek play that had been presented at the Odeum of Agrippa Ligurinus the week before. Of the barbarians massing at the border he said nothing at all. Of his father’s grave illness, nothing. Of his hope of close friendship with Justinianus, nothing. He might just as well have been discussing the weather. Menandros gravely met immateriality with immateriality. He could do nothing else, Faustus understood. The Caesar Heraclius must be allowed to lead, here.