Invitation to Die Read online

  The officer’s orders had been specific: no collusion. He tapped his nose, in a more-than-my-post’s-worth gesture. All he would say was: “It is a banquet for the fallen.”

  “Oh!” exclaimed Meline, much too brightly. “Claudia darling, Domitian wants to talk about death!”

  “Oh shit!” whispered one of the little boys. He was about eight, but had correctly interpreted this as a situation when he was allowed to say it.

  3

  Claudia Rufina had lived in Rome for a few more years than her sister-in-law. Hosidia Meline sometimes uttered words of sombre prophesy, relishing doom like a tragic chorus in a drama festival. Meline might dare to assess the Emperor’s secret motives, then even to show how much she despised the political regime she was now obliged to live in. Because Claudia was an anxious wife and mother, for her it had become second nature to pretend everything was all right—even though in Domitian’s Rome, that no longer applied. “I am sure it will be a lovely occasion!” Even to herself, she thought, You’re wittering! It won’t be.…

  Taurinus grunted. He recognised her meaning. He had served under many sarcastic centurions.

  He gave a signal to the men.

  “Be very careful how you step on the pavements at the corner, when you pass under the aqueducts,” Claudia advised the soldiers with genuine kindness, as they completed their errand, strapped up their satchels, prepared to depart. “There are so many puddles from the water leaks, it is easy to slip over.”

  “And watch out for the beggars!” snorted Meline. She spoke with less concern for the soldiers’ welfare, more local outrage. “The prisoners who built the Amphitheatre have been turned loose on us. My husband keeps writing to the authorities about the problem, but of course no one ever listens.”

  Not bothering to be grateful for their advice, the officer turned away, intent on the next delivery. He led away his men, tailed by their downtrodden clerk. Their guide fixed his eyes on the street map, looking up their next address. The soldiers were marching more stiffly than usual, as they tried to ignore the fact that three children, one a very small girl, had fallen in behind and were marching with them. Fortunately, the eldest boy whistled to bring his siblings back home.

  * * *

  At the far end of the short road, two men in their forties turned a corner. They stopped and stood watching. Both were casually dressed in belted white tunics, which gave nothing away about their status; however, the belts were expensive—soldiers notice—while both men were easy in their skins in a way that actually said it all. One gave the passing officer a quiet salute, so he had military experience. In return, the troops snapped to attention as they went by. Neither party spoke to the other.

  The two men strolled unhurriedly up to the Camillus property, where their waiting wives silently handed them their invitations. Each addressee looked down at his document. Each pulled a face.

  “Domitian wants to have dinner with you.” Hosidia Meline made it a simple statement, watching for her husband’s reaction; he gave none. That was husbands the world over.

  “He is inviting the whole Senate,” added Claudia Rufina, sounding more anxious.

  The brothers looked up and glanced at one another briefly. Still neither commented.

  Aelianus reviewed the street behind them, where a few neighbours had— coincidentally, no doubt—found reasons to come outside so they could stare. Justinus did not even bother to look, sticking his imperial request under his arm like some routine note from his estate manager. Each family went inside its own home, the children jumping about their father excitedly.

  * * *

  Moving ahead of his brood with practised ease, Justinus strode immediately to his study on his own, then he closed the door after him very firmly.

  It had been his father’s room first. Now there were plenty of scrolls and note tablets that Quintus used in his work as a lawyer, although other containers and shelves still held material that had belonged to his father, Decimus. Perhaps he would sort through them one day. Dusty busts of poets gazed down from the tops of cupboards. Some were unidentifiable, so they might be corrupt politicians, though they all had noble brows and sturdy noses. Sculptors know what is required. So many of the unscrupulous are blessed with handsome features, Decimus would say; it helps them get away with it.

  A bust of the Emperor Vespasian, unashamedly wrinkled and characteristically smiling, lurked lower down; his large bald head was sometimes sponged free of spider’s webs because he had been the old senator’s friend. Vespasian fathered Domitian, though nobody held him responsible for Domitian’s way of ruling. Tyranny is something you choose for yourself, Decimus said.

  He had once ventured to say it to Vespasian, when he and the genial old Emperor were having a spat about the way the Camillus boys’ careers had been blocked for political reasons. Vespasian had allowed him to speak out, though their careers remained stalled.

  Closing the heavy door immediately cut off this room from the rest of the substantial home, though it failed to mask all evidence of domestic life. An occupant would still hear low conversations among slaves who were using inane discussion as an excuse not to do anything. No door ever blotted out the trundling racket of Claudius, aged two and a half, endlessly pushing his small horse-on-wheels round and around the colonnades of a nearby interior garden. From time to time he sat down abruptly on his sagging loincloth and fell worryingly silent. Then, with an unexpected squeal of delight he would suddenly resume rattling his toy along the uneven mosaic, earning himself the muttered nickname of “right little Claudius.”

  This pattern of everyday life formed a sensory background that was as familiar as the fading frescos on the walls. From the clank of the man filling buckets at the tap from the aqueduct, through the maid singing to herself as she beat bedcovers before slinging them over the upstairs balcony rail to air, to the scents of new bakery bread and the first stirrings of oil sizzling in pannikins for lunchtime snacks, this was home. Its routines were not consciously noticed; they seemed unremarkable, yet if those sounds and smells ever stopped for some reason, the shock would jar. A possible reason had just been delivered today.

  Quintus dropped into the chair his father had used when he dived in here to escape family stress. It was a straight-backed armchair, easy to read in, that looked as if it had been borrowed from a schoolteacher. Perhaps it was left behind by the decaying specimen who used to be employed here, a wheezy grammarian the family now thought of recalling for their next generation of sons; he still needed to work and had always been cheap.

  Quintus leaned forward, elbows on his knees, head bent, and buried his face in his hands with a groan. Anyone who knew them both would have said he resembled his father more than usual at that moment. Though taller and more lithe, he had the same sprouting hair and now the same air of rueful domestic dread. He straightened up again just in time. Instinct warned him: His elder son had sneaked into the room.

  Gaius closed the door behind him with the same firm click Quintus had used, the “keep out; I’m working until dinner” gesture that Decimus had employed to maintain the myth he was master in his own house—or at least within this sanctum. The boy was probably unaware of what he did. Heredity is wonderful.

  Gaius was tall, like both his parents; tall for his age. At thirteen this meant he was still wearing tunics with a narrow purple stripe, although next year he would formally exchange them for plain white, plus the toga of manhood. By Roman tradition, he would then have to suffer with a rhetoric teacher, which was why Quintus was vaguely wondering who to hire. It would be a significant moment. Quintus liked to explain with cheery guffaws that if a boy who reached manhood committed an offence, he would be deemed to have full criminal intent, whereas now, anyone who came complaining about him would have to prove Gaius had known what he was doing. No more riding away on a neighbour’s donkey if it was foolishly left tethered in the street, then saying you had just thought it looked lonely.

  As his mother, Claudia, often noticed grimly, Gaius would soon be even more good-looking than his father; once he gained his confidence, he would have the same attractiveness and charm. So far he had no idea about women. He scarpered if one looked at him. Claudia knew that would not last. The easy-going charisma that had made her fall in love all those years ago was likely to be repeated. Weeping girls would beg her to intercede for them.…

  “Hello son. Come to see me? Pull up a seat.”

  Gaius did so, unearthing a stool from piles of untidy documents, which he carefully lifted and placed on a side table, trying to keep them just as they were. He knew Quintus would remember all that was in this apparently haphazard mound; while he was working, he would be able to go straight to anything he wanted.

  Moving the stuff gave the boy an opportunity to look around until he spotted where his papa had tossed Domitian’s invitation, still unopened.

  “Don’t look so worried.” That was how Quintus often began conversations with his children. And with his wife. Claudia had originally felt patronised, but she learned to live with it. Everyone eventually fell in with the strong, relaxed, comforting Quintus Camillus Justinus. He could calm anyone—even Claudia who, because she owned the money, sometimes tried to be her own woman.

  Gaius nodded at the invitation. “Aren’t you going to open it?”

  They had recently shared tentative political exchanges. The boy was bright, curious about the society he would soon be entering formally. He listened in on adult conversations, picking up that people around him thought that Rome was beset with problems. Quintus never disguised the truth. Even so, despite his liberal way of running his household, he had to be careful how much he said. An incautious statement could be passed on by slaves—that was obvious—but according to rumour, in today’s Rome pare
nts were even being betrayed by their own children.

  As a practising lawyer, Quintus was close to the tense environment where political informers did their worst. Domitian listened to them. Being paranoid, the Emperor positively wanted to hear about bad behaviour. True or not, shocking tales of things that he reckoned he ought to stamp out found a ready audience. In Domitian’s eyes, crimes, plots, adultery, having worked for his father, or simply holding intellectual opinions all justified his paranoia. Then people told him what he wanted to believe. He guzzled it down and rewarded them. The whispers did not have to be true.

  Reaching for the palace’s sealed note, Quintus shrugged to imply he saw it as unimportant. Then to satisfy the boy, he broke it open, read it, tossed the thing back on the side table. He flipped it with a casual air to show he had been right. It nestled between a peg calendar and a pottery oil lamp that was never used because it was cracked.

  After a moment Gaius reached for it to read for himself. Quintus watched, then murmured, “Just a request to attend a banquet, as Mother said. I suppose the soldiers must have told her who is going.”

  “The whole Senate?”

  “Not specified.”

  Gaius was anxious. “The Emperor hates the Senate, you say that all the time.”

  Quintus moved restlessly in his wicker armchair. After he stretched, massaging his neck, he tried out his well-known winning grin, but his son, who knew it of old, simply scowled. “I suppose,” Quintus confided, “I had better assign that statement to ‘questionable evidence’ and cross-examine myself brutally: ‘Isn’t the truth, Camillus Justinus, that you know full well the Emperor never consults the Senate, preferring to rely upon his own stunningly wise judgement?…’ The thing is, Gaius, Domitian may wish he wasn’t stuck with the Senate’s existence, yet he will not openly reveal his dislike. That is because rulers such as him—”

  “Tyrannical bastards?” Gaius suggested innocently, with a smile of his own. He was learning.

  “Single-minded, self-assured, self-serving … devious, uncontrollable tyrannical bastards—but I never said that, Gaius—these rulers are a particular type. We have had them before. For some odd reason, they always claim to be extremely traditional. Rome has been run by a Senate since the founding of the city. How many years?”

  “Eight hundred and forty-two,” whipped back the boy, as if answering his schoolmaster.

  “Good stuff! Emperors may be new in that context—we’ve had emperors for less than a hundred years—but none has yet dismantled the Senate. That’s mainly because, even though emperors control so much, they first acquire their power through the Senate voting to give it to them. This locks the Emperor into a relationship. Cull the Senate, and you undermine your own position. Besides, emperors whose actions are unpopular rely very heavily on saying they are following the rules. Blame the rules, not the man who finds himself stuck with them. Eight hundred years is a solid system. Domitian will not want to be seen to abolish it.”

  “So he just lets you sit in the Curia on session days and make a few laws?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Unimportant ones?

  “Law,” proclaimed the noble Camillus Justinus, since he made his living by it, “is always important.”

  “Right! But the Emperor never has to be so friendly with the Senate that he feels obliged to ask you all to dinner?”

  Once again the father attempted to put forward a line that would sound safe if an informer got hold of their discussion: “No, he has no obligation, so it is very gracious of him. Our Emperor is known for giving civilised banquets, with fine food and delightful entertainment.”

  Gaius sniffed. “You don’t believe that. I heard you say he winds things up too early. He doesn’t enjoy the eats and drinks, he upsets guests by saying rude things about them, he chucks bread and flicks sauce at them because nobody dares object.”

  “I should have known,” Quintus remarked to the ceiling in a man-to-man fashion, “not to say that with children listening! No imitations, Gaius. You haven’t been given tribunician powers by the Senate, so don’t you try sauce-flicking at home.”

  “Our mother would never allow it.”

  “No, and I suppose if Domitian had not lost his mother when he was young, maybe he would have been brought up as nicely as you lucky bunch.”

  During their last remarks, the study door had opened. Someone was leaning against the architrave, listening in. Fortunately it was not an informer.

  Quintus, when he noticed, gave no hint of anxiety, merely cocking up one eyebrow to enquire why the visitor had come.

  “So,” drawled his brother Aulus laconically. “This dinner tonight. Are we going then?”

  4

  “What do you think?” Quintus consulted his brother. “Are we?”

  “No option.”

  “It’s only a dinner.”

  “It’s dinner with him.”

  “As you said then—no choice!”

  “Freedom of choice is for barbarians. Their luxury. We live in a regulated society, sadly for us.” Now Aulus spent a few moments posing like an orator, one arm extended; Quintus leaned back in his chair, listening. The elder brother, chunkier and very slightly shorter, spoke more satirically than usual: “We get up, wash our faces, spend the day trudging those antiquated plough tracks that were dug out for us by our sturdy, porridge-eating forefathers. Honouring the national gods, obeying our wives, being very polite to our banker, rudely ignoring our doctor—then jumping whenever our Emperor commands. Mindless automata. Mere mechanical toys.”

  “He doesn’t command us to dinner. It is neutrally phrased. Titus Flavius Domitianus Augustus Germanicus, conqueror of the Chatti and Dacians, in the ninth year of his tribunitian power, fourteen times consul, imperator, pontifex maximus, princeps and Father of the Country, invites your attendance at a banquet on the Palatine.”

  “Nine bloody years, eh? Feels like a lifetime. Nice to tell us who he is. Modest … You did read it, then?” scoffed Aulus.

  “But of course. Had to check what it was. I was hoping some defendant was offering to bribe me on a case. Yes. I read it—and you are right, perspicacious brother: The wording is cordial, though there is no helpful indication of who to reply to, in the event of our unavailability.”

  “Unfortunate illness.”

  “Death of favourite horse.”

  “Allergic to aspic.”

  “Don’t want to get accidental shellfish poisoning from lukewarm nibbles.”

  “Don’t want deliberate poisoning.…”

  Both senators beamed at the boy. Aren’t we clever? Don’t you love our merry banter?

  “Is he planning to do something?” asked Gaius, entirely serious. “Something terrible?”

  His father and uncle stopped beaming. Each seemed to be waiting for the other to come up with a neat answer.

  “If he is, we shall have to be patient and see,” said Quintus.

  Any father of six children will have learned to answer questions vaguely.

  After a pause, during which Gaius was clearly brooding, the worried boy commented, “Six hundred senators. That would require huge vats of poison. I believe that strong, very fast-acting poisons have been developed at the palace in the past, but it would be a logistical nightmare.”

  His father qualified the numbers: “It is generally accepted that only about a third of Senate members are active. Discount all the ones who hold official posts so are legitimately in foreign lands—legionary legates and tribunes, provincial governors and their young finance officers—forget the ones in exile for criminal activity, and those who are simply too ga-ga to be let off their country estates.… Two hundred actual guests, call it.”

  “Swords,” said Aulus, king of the terse rejoinder.

  Gaius thought it through. “Swords? So, two hundred men, Praetorians it ought to be, move in quietly behind the dining couches while everyone is reclining and off-guard. Then at a signal, the troops all bring out their weapons, step close and in a synchronised movement they cut throats.… Messy! There would be vats of blood, blood sploshing all over the place.”