Robert Silverberg - With Caesar in the Underworld

“What does it say?” Faustus asked. Licinius seemed to be having difficulties forming words.

“The Caesar,” Licinius said. “His Majesty the Emperor, that is. Wounded. A hunting accident, this morning. He remains at his lodge. The Imperial surgeons have been called.”

“Wounded? How seriously?”

Licinius responded with a blank look. “Wounded, it says. That’s all: wounded. The Caesar has been wounded, while hunting. The Emperor.—He is our Emperor now, is he not?” The Chancellor seemed numb, as though he had had a stroke. To the courier he said, “Do you know any other details, man? How badly is he hurt? Did you see him yourself? Who’s in charge at the lodge?” But the courier knew nothing. He had been given the message by a member of the Caesar’s guard and told to get it immediately to the capital; that was all he was able to report.

Four hours later, dining with the ambassador Menandros in the ambassador’s rooms at the Severan Palace, Faustus said, “The messages continued to come in from the lake all afternoon. Wounded, first. Then, wounded seriously. Then a description of the wound: speared in the gut by one of his own men, he was, some sort of confusion while they were closing in on a boar for the kill, somebody’s horse rearing at the wrong moment. Then the next message, half an hour later: the Imperial surgeons are optimistic. Then, the Caesar Heraclius is dying. And then: the Caesar Heraclius is dead.”

“The Emperor Heraclius, should you not call him?” Menandros asked.

“It’s not certain who died first, the Emperor Maximilianus at Roma or the Caesar Heraclius at Lake Nemorensis. I suppose they can work all that out later. But what difference does it make, except to the historians? Dead is dead. Whether he died as Heraclius Caesar or as Heraclius Augustus, he’s still dead, and his brother is our next Emperor. Can you believe it? Maximilianus is going to be Emperor? One moment he’s wallowing around with you in some orgy at the pool of the Baptai, and the next he’s sitting on the throne. Maximilianus! The last thing he ever imagined, becoming Emperor.”

“That soothsayer told him that he would,” Menandros said.

A shiver of awe ran through Faustus. “Yes! Yes, by Isis, so he did! And Maximilianus was as furious as though the man had laid a curse on him. Which perhaps he had.” Shakily he refilled his wine bowl. “ Emperor! Maximilianus!”

“Have you seen him yet?”

“No, not yet. It isn’t seemly to rush to him so fast.”

“You were his closest friend, weren’t you?”

“Yes, yes, of course. And doubtless there’ll be some benefit to that.” Faustus allowed himself a little smirk of pleasure. “Under Heraclius, I’d have been finished, I suppose. Pensioned off, shipped to the country. But it’ll be different for me with Maximilianus in charge. He’ll need me. He will, won’t he?” The thought had only then occurred to him in any coherent way. But the more he examined it, the more it pleased him. “He’s never cultivated any of the court officials; he doesn’t know them, really, won’t know which ones to trust, which to get rid of. I’m the only one who can advise him properly. I might even become Chancellor, Menandros, do you realize that?—But that’s exactly why I haven’t gone speeding over to see him tonight. He’s busy with the priests, anyway, doing whatever religious rites it is a new Emperor is supposed to perform, and then the Senators are calling on him one by one, and so on and so forth. It would be too blatant, wouldn’t it, if I turned up there so soon, his bawdy and disreputable old drinking companion Faustus, who by coming around the very first night would be sending an all too obvious signal that he’s showing up right away to claim his reward for these years of hearty good fellowship the two of us have shared. No, Menandros, I wouldn’t do anything so crass. Maximilianus is not going to forget me. Tomorrow, I suppose, he’ll be holding his first salutatio, and I can come around then and—”

“His what? I don’t know the word.”

“ Salutatio? You must know what that means. In your language you’d say, ‘a greeting.’ But what it is in Imperial terms is a mass audience with the Roman populace: the Emperor sits enthroned in the Forum, and the people pass before him and salute him and hail him as Emperor. It’ll be quite appropriate for me to go before him then, with all the rest. And have him smile at me, and wink, and say, ‘Come to me after all this nonsense is over, Faustus, because we have important things to discuss.’”

“This is not a custom we have at Constantinopolis, the salutatio, ” Menandros said.

“A Roman thing, it is.”

“We are Romans also, you know.”

“So you are. But you are Greekified Romans, you Easterners—in your particular case, a Romanized Greek, even—with customs that bear the tincture of the old Oriental despots who lie far back in your history, the Pharaohs, the Persian kings, Alexander the Great. Whereas we are Romans of Roma. We once had a Republic here that chose its leaders every year, do you know that?—two outstanding men whom the Senate picked to share power with each other, and at the end of their year they would step down and two others were brought forward. We lived like that for hundreds of years, ruled by our Consuls, until a few problems arose and it became necessary for Augustus Caesar to alter the arrangements somewhat. But we still maintain some traces of that staunch old Republic of the early days. The salutatio is one of them.”

“I see,” Menandros said. He did not sound impressed. He busied himself with his wine for a time. Then, breaking a long silence that had developed between them, he said, “You don’t think Prince Maximilianus might have had his brother murdered, do you?”

“What? ”

“Hunting accidents aren’t all that hard to arrange. A scuffle among the horses in the morning fog, an unfortunate little collision, a spear thrust in the wrong place—”

“Are you serious, Menandros?”

“About half, I’d say. These things have been known to happen. Even I could see from the very first what contempt Maximilianus had for his brother. And now the old Emperor is on his last legs. The Empire will go to the unpopular and inadequate Heraclius. So your friend the Caesar, either for the good of the Empire or purely out of the love of power, decides to have Heraclius removed, just as the Emperor is plainly sinking toward his end. The assassin then is slain also, to keep him quiet in case there’s an inquest and he’s put to the torture, and there you are—Heraclius is gone and Maximilianus III Augustus is in charge. It’s not impossible. What became of the man who put the spear into Prince Heraclius, do you by any chance know?”

“He killed himself within an hour of the event, as a matter of fact, out of sheer chagrin. Do you think Maximilianus bribed him to do that, too?”

Menandros smiled faintly and made no reply. This was all just a game for him, Faustus realized.

“The good of the Empire,” Faustus said, “is not a concept upon which the Caesar Maximilianus has ever expended much thought. If you were listening closely to much of what he said when he was in our company, you might have perceived that. As for the love of power, here you will have to take my word for it, but I think he has not an atom of that within himself. You saw how enraged he became when that idiot of a soothsayer told him he was going to be a great hero of the Empire? ‘You are mocking me to my face,’ Maximilianus said, or words to that effect. And then, when the man went on to predict that Maximilianus was going to become Emperor, too—” Faustus laughed. “No, my friend, there was never any conspiracy here. Not even in his dreams did Maximilianus see himself as an Emperor. What happened to Prince Heraclius was mere accident, the gods making sport with us yet again, and my guess is that our new Emperor is having a hard time coming to terms with fate’s little prank. I would go so far as to say that he is the unhappiest man in Roma tonight.”