Robert Silverberg - With Caesar in the Underworld

Chanted words came up from below, harsh jabbing rhythms:

“Come to me, great Lord Priapus, as sunlight comes to the morning sky. Come to me, great Lord Priapus, and give me favor, sustenance, elegance, beauty, and delight. Your names in heaven are LAMPTHEN—OUOTH OUASTHEN—OUTHI OAMENOTH—ENTHOMOUCH. And I know your forms: in the east you are an ibis, in the west you are a wolf, in the north you have the form of a serpent, and in the south you are an eagle. Come to me, Lord Priapus—come to me, Lord Priapus, come—”

One by one the women danced up to the great statue, kissed the tip of that great phallus, caressed it lasciviously.

“I invoke you, Priapus! Give me favor, form, beauty! Give me delight. For you are I, and I am you. Your name is mine, and mine is yours.”

There was a tremendous demoniacal clatter of drumming. Faustus knew what that meant: one of the worshipers was mounting the statue of the god. Menandros, avidly staring, leaned much too far forward. At this stage of the ceremony there was little risk that any of the impassioned celebrants would look upward and catch a glimpse of him, but there was some danger that he might go tumbling down into the cavern below and land amongst them. It had been known to happen. Death was the penalty for any man caught spying on the rites of the adherents of Priapus. Faustus reached for him; but Maximilianus had already caught him and was tugging him back.

Though covert surveillance of these rites was forbidden, men were not entirely excluded from the chapel. Faustus knew that five or six stalwart slaves were lined up along the wall of the chapel in the shadows behind the statue. Soon the priestess of Priapus would give the signal and the orgy would begin.

They practically needed to drag Menandros away. He crouched by the rim of the aperture like a small boy greedy to discover the intimate secrets of womankind, and even after the event had gone on and on long beyond the point where even the most curious of men should have been sated by the sight, Menandros wanted to see more. Faustus was baffled by this strange hunger of his. He could barely remember a time when any of what was taking place down there had been new and unfamiliar to him, and it was hard to understand Menandros’s passionate curiosity over so ordinary a matter as orgiastic copulation. The court of the Emperor Justinianus, Faustus thought, must place an extraordinarily high value on chastity and propriety. But that was not what Faustus had been told.

At last they got the ambassador out of there and they went on to the next place on his list, the pool of the Baptai. “I’ll wait for you here,” said Faustus, as they arrived at the steep spiraling stairway that led down into the pit of utter blackness where the rites of this cult of immersion occurred. “I’m getting too fat and slow for that much clambering.”

It was, he knew, an enchanting place: the smooth-walled rock-hewn chambers bedecked with iridescent glass mosaics in white and red and blue, brightened even further by splashes and touches of vivid golden paint, the scenes of Diana at the hunt, of cooing doves, of cupids swimming among swans, of voluptuous nymphs, of rampant satyrs. But the air was damp and heavy, the interminable downward spiral of the narrow, slippery stone steps would be hard on his aging legs, and the final taxing stage of the long descent, the one that went from the chamber of the mosaics to the fathomless black pool that lay at the lowest level, was beyond all doubt much too much for him. And of course the mere thought of the ascent afterward was utterly appalling.

So he waited. A tinkling trickle of laughter drifted up to him out of the darkness. The goddess Bendis of Thrace was the deity worshiped here, a coarse lank-haired demon whose devotees were utterly shameless, and at any hour of the day or night one generally could find a service in progress, a ritual that involved the usual sort of orgiastic stuff enlivened by a climactic baptismal plunge into the icy pool, where Bendis lurked to provide absolution for sins just committed and encouragement for those yet to come. This was no secret cult. All were welcome here. But the mysteries of the cult of Bendis were no longer mysterious to Faustus. He had had baptism in those freezing waters often enough for one lifetime; he did not seek it again. And the skillful ministrations of his Numidian playmate Oalathea were gratification enough for his diminishing lusts these days.

It was a very long time before Menandros and Maximilianus returned from the depths. They said little when they emerged, but it was clear from the flushed, triumphant look on the little Greek’s face that he had found whatever ecstasies he had been seeking in the shrine of the Baptai.

Now it was time for the place of the Chaldean whores, far across the underground city near the welter of caverns below the Circus Maximus. Menandros seemed to have heard a great deal about these women, most of it incorrect. “You mustn’t call them whores, you know,” Faustus explained. “What they are is prostitutes—sacred prostitutes.”

“This is a very subtle distinction,” said the Greek wryly.

“What he means,” said the Caesar, “is that they’re all women of proper social standing, who belong to a cult that came to us out of Babylonia. Some of them are of Babylonian descent themselves, most are not. Either way, the women of this cult are required at some point in their lives, between the ages of—what is it, Faustus, sixteen and thirty?—something like that—to go to the sanctuary of their goddess and sit there waiting for some stranger to come along and choose her for the night. He throws a small silver coin into her lap, and she must rise and go with him, however hideous he is, however repellent. And with that act she fulfills her obligation to her goddess, and returns therewith to a life of blameless purity.”

“Some, I understand, are said to go back more than once to fulfill their obligations,” Faustus said. “Out of an excess of piety, I suppose. Unless it is for the simple excitement of meeting strangers, of course.”

“I must see this,” Menandros said. He was aglow with boyish eagerness again. “Virtuous women, you say, wives and daughters of substantial men? And they must give themselves? They can’t refuse under any circumstances? Justinianus will find this hard to believe.”

“It is an Eastern thing,” said Faustus. “Out of Babylonian Chaldea. How strange that you have none of this at your own capital.” It did not ring true. From all accounts Faustus had heard, Constantinopolis was at least as much a hotbed of Oriental cults as Roma itself. He began to wonder whether there was some reason of state behind Menandros’s apparent desire to paint the Eastern Empire as a place of such rigorous piety and virtue. Perhaps it had something to do with the terms of the treaty that Menandros had come here to negotiate. But he could not immediately see what the connection might be.

Nor did they see the holy Chaldean prostitutes that day. They were less than halfway across the Underworld when they became aware of a muddled din of upraised voices coming to them out of the Via Subterranea ahead, and as they drew closer to that broad thoroughfare they began to distinguish some detail of individual words. The shouts still were blurred and confused, but what they seemed to be saying was:

“The Emperor is dead! The Emperor is dead!”

“Can it be?” Faustus asked. “Am I hearing rightly?”

But then it came again, a male voice with the force of the bellowings of a bull rising above all the others: “THE EMPEROR IS DEAD! THE EMPEROR IS DEAD!” There was no possible doubt of the meaning now.

“So soon,” Maximilianus murmured, in a voice that could have been that of a dead man itself. “It wasn’t supposed to happen today.”